A Year of Growth: Marking Two Years of ChatGPT Let's take a walk down the memory lane to celebrate the second birthday of the AI buddy

Just when OpenAI's chatGPT was shy of completing a year of existence—amid a back-and-forth leadership controversy—Sam Altman returned as the chief executive officer at OpenAI with a new interim board in tow.

What followed has been a year full of partnerships, product launches, and the ever-unavoidable backlash and clash.

Let's take a walk down the memory lane to celebrate the second birthday of the AI buddy-

1. Creating video from text with Sora- In February, it revealed its new text-to-video model, Sora, capable of generating videos up to a minute long based on any prompt. "Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world," states the official website. Despite the anticipated March public release, the AI tool remains in close beta testing
2. Global news partnerships- In March, OpenAI forged and announced partnerships with global media outlets, including Le Monde, Prisa Media, El País, Cinco Días, As, and El Huffpos, to onboard high-quality content on recent events and use their content to train its models.
3. The flagship product: GPT-4o- In May, it launched its newest flagship model and made more capabilities available for free in ChatGPT. Calling it "faster" and improving on "capabilities across text, voice, and vision," OpenAI noted that future improvements will allow for natural, real-time voice conversation and the ability to converse with the generative AI via real-time video.
4. Entering the search engine market- In July, it announced the testing of SearchGPT, a temporary prototype of new AI search features. "SearchGPT will quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources," said the company in a statement. With this announcement, OpenAI rivals Google, Microsoft's Bing and Perplexity.
5. "Think before responding" AI model- In September, a new series of AI models was launched to spend more time thinking before responding. According to the official statement, the AI model could reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math. Called OpenAI o1, OpenAI terms it the "first of this series in ChatGPT and our API."
6. ChatGPT search and canvas- October saw the organisation make two announcements- ChatGPT search and canvas. Launched as a search engine, ChatGPT search is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o and leverages third-party search providers. Meanwhile, the namesake of the Australian graphic design giant, canvas offers a new way of working with ChatGPT to write and code. Launched as a beta, it introduces a new way of working together, side by side.