A massive earthquake occurred in San Francisco on November 30, 2022. It was so powerful that hardly a person on the planet was unaffected, and yet, no seismometer detected it. This metaphorical “earthquake” was the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. Word of the online chatbot service that anyone could use free of charge quickly spread around the world and after mere five days, it had more than a million registered users (compare this to the five years that it took the Elements of AI to reach the same number), and in two months, the number of signups was 100 million. No other AI service, or probably any service whatsoever, has become a household name so quickly.
The first version of ChatGPT was based on a GPT-3.5 model fine tuned by supervised and reinforcement learning according to a large number of human-rated responses. The purpose of the finetuning process was to steer the model away from toxic and incorrect responses that the language model had picked up from its training data, and towards comprehensive and helpful responses.