1.1. History of ChatGPT
The growing public interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) reflects the efforts of major technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Baidu, to develop AI-based services and products. For example, Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, while Google has released an experimental AI service called Bard. Generative AI, such as Chinchilla AI and Large Language Models, are also becoming increasingly popular (Zarifhonarvar, 2023).
In 2020, OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, launched third generation of its autoregressive language model, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which uses deep learning to produce human-like text (Brown et al., 2020). This model was developed on a corpus of almost 500 billion unlabeled tokens, representing the largest natural language processing (NLP) model in the world with 175 billion parameters (Radford et al., 2018). OpenAI was founded with the goal of developing AI systems that can outperform humans in different tasks (OpenAI, 2015).
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a chatbot that leverages reinforcement learning to interact with its users (Grant & Metz, 2022). Quickly gaining widespread attention, ChatGPT was referred to as the industry's next big disruptor due to the quality of its response output (Shankland, 2022; Vanian, 2022). Within one week of its release, the artificial intelligence system had attracted over a million users on various social media platforms (Zarifhonarvar, 2023). This was notably faster than Instagram and TikTok, which respectively took nine and thirty months to reach a hundred million active users.
Recent media reports suggest that ChatGPT may be a formidable contender to Google (Brown, 2022), potentially leading to digital transformation (Tyrrell, 2022). However, San Altman, CEO of the company, has noted that the platform is still in its early testing stage (Altman, 2022), limiting its current capabilities. Nevertheless, ChatGPT still presents a promising indication of the potential of AI.
Generative AI has the potential to increase worker productivity by 10% (Megahed et al., 2023). Moreover, this technology is estimated to create trillions of dollars in economic value (Huang et al., 2022). In 2022, OpenAI invested over $1 billion in generative AI (Griffith & Metz, 2023). Despite these potential advantages, there is a growing concern regarding the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the knowledge economy, education, and skilled workers (Krugman, 2022; Locke, 2022; Marche, 2022).