ChatGPT, OpenAI’s free chatbot based on GPT-3.5, was released on 30 November 2022 and racked up a million users in five days. It is capable of writing emails, essays, code and phishing emails, if the user knows how to ask.
By comparison, it took Twitter two years to reach a million users. Facebook took ten months, Dropbox seven months, Spotify five months, Instagram six weeks. Pokemon Go took ten hours, so don’t break out the champagne bottles, but still, five days is pretty impressive for a web-based tool that didn’t have any built-in name recognition.
There are so many good reasons to be panicking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT right now. It writes better essays than the average high school or college student. It can write and debug code.
