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It turns out that the world’s most famous AI chatbot originally had a different name, and ChatGPT was nicknamed only on the last night before its release.
Two leaders involved in the development of the chatbot, researcher Mark Chen and ChatGPT CEO Nick Turley, told about this in an episode of the OpenAI podcast.
«It was supposed to be called Chat with GPT-3.5, and late one night we decided to simplify it to», — says Turley, recalling the last day before the first version was launched in 2022. «We realized it would be hard to pronounce and came up with a great name to replace».
This is how ChatGPT — from the word chat and the abbreviation «generative pre-trained transformer» (generative pre-trained transformer) appeared. Although at the time, the developers had no idea that this name would soon be on the lips of millions or even a billion users.
«We had so many launches, so many previews, and this one was really something special,» Chen said. «My parents just stopped asking me to go work at Google».
Obviously, the successful launch of the product did not go unnoticed by major tech competitors: they followed up with their own chatbots launched Google and Microsoft, which initially has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and secured the right to use the product exclusively; not to mention the creations of hundreds of other startups, such as Claude by Anthropic.
Interestingly, despite the fact that both OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot rely on the same AI technologies and models, ChatGPT had more than 52 times more visits than Copilot in the US this February, with 173.3 million daily visits compared to 98.9 million monthly traffic for Copilot.
As of March 2025, ChatGPT had more than 600 million active users, and at one point gained an additional million in just one day — the growth can be attributed to the launch of of the new GPT-4o image generator, which led to the emergence of viral Ghibli memes.
Source: Windows Central, Business Insider