SIGMA I / FUNCTION OFART: THE IONGANICA NARRATIVE – Part Two

On 30 November 2022, a Wednesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT. It was a GPT-3.5 model fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback. It was a free research preview.³ Zero marketing dollars were spent. No launch event. No press conference. No keynote. A blog post and a URL. One million users in five days. One hundred million in two months. The fastest-growing consumer application in the history of the internet — faster than TikTok (nine months), faster than Instagram (two and a half years), faster than any metric that UBS analysts, who had tracked the internet space for twenty years,⁵ could recall.² The spring of Episode 16 had been building for a decade — AlexNet to GPT-3, each year a deeper root, each architecture a wider branch. But the spring had been visible only to researchers, to the three gardeners and their students, to the narrow community of people who read arXiv papers and attended NeurIPS. ChatGPT did something that no previous breakthrough had done: it put the spring in the hands of everyone. A nurse in Manila. A teenager in Cairo. A tax accountant in Kansas. A poet in Lagos. Anyone with a browser and a question could talk to an intelligence that was not human.