The 'late-night decision' that led to ChatGPT's name
On the latest episode of the OpenAI podcast, two leadersinvolved with the chatbot's development, research chief Mark Chen and head of ChatGPT Nick Turley, spoke about the days leading up to the launch that made the tool go viral.
"It was going to be Chat with GPT-3.5, and we had a late-night decision to simplify" the name, Turley said on the podcast published July 1. The team made the name change the day before the version's late 2022 launch, he said.
"We realized that that would be hard to pronounce and came up with a great name instead," Turley said.
They settled on ChatGPT, short for "generative pre-trained transformer."
Since then, ChatGPT has gained millions of users who turn to the chatbot for everything from routine web searches to guidance on how to give a friend career advice. Rivals, including Meta AI, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek, have also sprung up.
Before ChatGPT's launch, few within OpenAI expected the name to be so consequential, said Andrew Mayne, the podcast host and OpenAI's former science communicator.
He said the chatbot's capabilities were largely similar to those of previous versions. The main differences included a more user-friendly interface and, of course, the name.
"It's the same thing, but we just put the interface in here and made it so you didn't have to prompt as much," Mayne said on the podcast.
After OpenAI launched ChatGPT, though, the chatbot took off, with Reddit users as far away as Japan experimenting with it, Turley said. It soon became clear that ChatGPT's popularity wasn't going to fade quickly and that the tool was "going to change the world," he said.
"We've had so many launches, so many previews over time, and this one really was something else," Chen said on the podcast.
ChatGPT's success represented another kind of milestone for Chen: "My parents just stopped asking me to go work for Google," he said.
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