---
id: "2022-11-30-chatgpt"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-11-30-chatgpt/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2022-11-30"
date_precision: day
category: product
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-11-30-chatgpt/

# OpenAI launches ChatGPT

OpenAI released ChatGPT, a conversational interface to a GPT-3.5 model fine-tuned with RLHF, as a free research preview; it became the fastest-growing consumer app to that point and triggered the generative AI boom.

## Key facts
- Launched 30 November 2022 as a free research preview
- Based on a model in the GPT-3.5 series, trained with RLHF
- Passed 1 million users within about five days
- Estimated at ~100M monthly users by January 2023 (UBS/Similarweb estimate)
- ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) launched February 2023

## What happened

ChatGPT let anyone chat with a capable LLM for free; its viral success forced Google, Meta, Microsoft and others into an AI race.

## Why it matters

The moment AI became a mass-market technology — the start of the current era of AI investment, adoption and policy attention.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Introducing ChatGPT (OpenAI)](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/) (openai.com, official)
2. [Wikipedia: ChatGPT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2023-03-14: [OpenAI releases GPT-4](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-14-gpt-4/index.md)
- 2022-01-27: [InstructGPT: RLHF aligns language models to follow instructions](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-01-27-instructgpt/index.md)