ChatGPT turns 2 and gives $8 trillion birthday gift to Big Tech

Saturday marks two years since OpenAI posted an oddly named widget called ChatGPT online. Its employees were betting on how many users it would accumulate, and the highest estimate was 100,000. How wrong they were.

ChatGPT quickly became the fastest growing app in history with around 200 million active users today. When it first came out, social media was ablaze with examples of how this floating little text box was a leap ahead of Amazon Inc.’s Alexa or Apple Inc.’s Siri. It could write poems and high school essays. It would probably reshape Hollywood and the education system. Some of that has happened, with schools rethinking how they assign homework, for example, while its impact on other areas of life and business remains an open question.