ChatGPT was released on November 30th 2022. What has changed since then?
- Hundreds of open-source models. Varying sized models from small to very large. Many are chat-tuned similar to ChatGPT.
- Distilled models from ChatGPT. Academics and competitors both used data from ChatGPT conversations to train or fine-tune their own models.
- Competition. Microsoft launched Bing Chat. Google launched Bard. Poe, Pi, Perplexity. Claude by Anthropic. Not to mention self-hosted open-source chat UIs and other wrappers. There’s no shortage of competition (although ChatGPT still is the most popular).
- RAG is hard. “Browse with Bing” and Bing Chat launched but hallucinations are still an issue. Browsing the internet doesn’t seem like the catch-all
- Not every launch increased performance across the board. Every new iteration of ChatGPT launched changed the way the model behaved. Many queries got better. Some got worse. Google has always had this problem as well, but applications aren’t build on Google.
- A consumer subscription model. ChatGPT Plus was released in February 2023. The consumer model maybe competes with the developer and enterprise products (why not just use the API?).
- Multi-modal. ChatGPT started to accept images and files in the chat. DALL-E and the vision API became integrated into the chat window. There are open-source models that are multi-modal, but so far no experience is as sleek as OpenAI’s.
- Plugins launched but never found product-market fit. Plugins launched but didn’t become the App Store that OpenAI hoped. Custom GPTs seem to be the next strategy for extensibility, although they won’t launch until next year.
- Code Interpreter is getting better. Agents and tool-use is still hard for LLMs. But it’s getting better and becoming more useful. Files can now be added directly to the UI to chat with.