Happy birthday ChatGPT

• • In 2020, I remember nerding out with GPT3 Playground, trying to kill time during COVID. Friends and I would jump on Zoom calls and explore this new tech. It seemed interesting, but I eventually moved on and forgot about it. On November 30, 2022, something called ChatGPT launched to the public. A friend who was on the original team that created and launched ChatGPT told me they figured that maybe 10,000 people would use the app. By January 2023, over 100 million people were using ChatGPT, making it the fastest-growing app in history. The mood in the data industry changed. Data Mesh was the hot story in 2022. By the time conference season rolled around in mid-2023, Data Mesh was no longer talked about. AI was the only topic anyone cared about. Every tech vendor suddenly had a chatbot for their product. If you recall, the ✨ emoji was the symbol for AI. And suddenly everyone was magically an AI “expert.” The AI models in 2023 and 2024 were crude and primitive, but you could start to get a sense of where things were going. This technology was eventually going to be everywhere. Since then, models are more capable. Chatbot interfaces are passe. Agents are the hotness. Context engineering has replaced prompt engineering. And unsexy fields like knowledge and library science are getting a lot of second looks. Just like everyone was an AI expert a couple of years ago, now it seems like everyone is an expert in ontologies and knowledge graphs. So it goes. Anyway, I’m getting a lot of utility out of the AI models. I use the latest versions of Claude, Gemini, and GPT daily. I don’t envision going back to a world before these models, which feels like a lifetime ago. And I’m excited for what’s next. Even if the current AI bubble pops, it won’t stop innovation in next-generation AI. It feels like we’re just at the cusp of a world resembling the science fiction and cyberpunk books I grew up reading as a kid. Whether people love or hate ChatGPT, there’s no denying that it has changed the world. Happy birthday, ChatGPT.