Has ChatGPT ever not been in the news since its launch in November 2022? The dominant name in generative AI, the company has more than 300 million weekly users and has taken the world by storm, generating both excitement for the future and concern.
After the release of GPT-3 to the general public, technology experts and policymakers sounded the alarm about AI misuse.
In this article, we will explore the history and technology behind ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
Developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI system designed to understand and generate conversational dialogue. The name "ChatGPT" refers to Generative Pre-training Transformer, a machine learning approach that enables the AI to process and generate human-sounding text.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has changed significantly since its founding in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and others as a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab that aims to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity when it arrives.
In 2019, OpenAI shifted to a "capped-profit" model to attract investment and scale its AI research. Since then, the AI developer has completed five major funding rounds, totaling over $49 billion. Now one of the most valuable AI companies in the world, OpenAI's rapid expansion has fueled tensions between Musk and Altman.
Musk has taken credit for creating OpenAI and accused OpenAI of straying from its mission, while Altman has called him "a bully." In August 2024, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging fraud. He argued that his $44 million investment was based on the understanding that OpenAI would remain a non-profit but that Altman had secretly planned to transition it into a for-profit company.
The rivalry between Musk and Altman escalated in February 2025 when a Musk-led group offered to buy OpenAI for $97 billion. As OpenAI moves further into the corporate sphere, the battle over AI's future -- and who controls it -- continues to intensify.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT works by predicting the most likely next words in a conversation based on patterns learned from vast amounts of data. It processes what you type, understands the context, and generates a natural and relevant response.
It doesn't think or have opinions -- it uses probabilities to create coherent replies. The more context it has, the better it can refine its answers, making interactions with it feel like a real conversation.
Key features of GPT models
These aspects are important because they make GPT models fast, adaptable, and efficient for various applications.
ChatGPT has expanded beyond text-based responses and now includes several powerful multimodal capabilities:
While not a feature of ChatGPT itself, OpenAI has given users access to its powerful video generator model, Sora. The company launched Sora in beta in February 2024 and made it publicly available in December 2024.
What are the limitations of ChatGPT?
While ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool, it has several limitations:
In April 2023, in an example of a hallucination episode, ChatGPT accused Jonathan Turley, a prominent law professor, of committing sexual assault -- a completely fabricated claim. Making matters worse, ChatGPT generated a fake Washington Post article link to support its claim.
The more expensive Pro subscription includes extended access to Sora (OpenAI's text-to-video AI generator), unlimited access to advanced voices, and unlimited access to all of OpenAI's reasoning models.
In February 2025, Altman unveiled an updated roadmap to streamline OpenAI's product lineup, merging its scattered AI models into a single unified system. The first step came later that month, with the release of GPT-4.5, which Altman billed as a "different kind of intelligence," while conceding that it was a "giant, expensive model."
As OpenAI continues to develop ChatGPT, more rivals are coming online to challenge the companies' dominance. In January, China-based hedge fund High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management released the free and open-source DeepSeek R1, which sent shockwaves through the AI industry, claiming that its model matched ChatGPT's performance while costing a fraction of what American companies spend on AI development.
After DeepSeek sent tech stocks into a tailspin, Musk offered to buy OpenAI for $97 billion. Altman declined the offer and instead offered to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion.
Meanwhile, Altman is convinced that AGI is coming and that OpenAI and ChatGPT will be driving it.