Unique Research · Timeline · December 5, 2024
ChatGPT — OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot — has gripped the world since November 2022. What began as a productivity tool for short prompts that draft essays and code is now used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth helped make OpenAI one of the most watched companies in years. A partnership with Apple’s upcoming generative AI, Apple Intelligence, gave OpenAI another major breakthrough in the AI race.
In 2024 OpenAI also shipped GPT-4o, ChatGPT’s new flagship omnimodel — now the default free model, with voice. After the GPT-4o demo, OpenAI paused a voice named “Sky” amid claims it echoed Scarlett Johansson’s voice in Her. Internally: co-founder and longtime chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left; the Superalignment team dissolved. Legally: copyright suits from Alden Global Capital newspapers including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune — after the New York Times had sued similarly.
December 2024: OpenAI announced “12 Days of OpenAI” — weekday livestreams from Dec 5, 10 a.m. PT, each with product launches or demos of different scale.
Late 2024 milestones
Sam Altman: ChatGPT weekly actives top 300M. At the NYT DealBook Summit, Altman said ChatGPT’s weekly active users passed 300 million — months after 200M in August 2024, and a little over a year after 100M in November 2023.
“David Mayer” crash. Users found ChatGPT refused questions about “David Mayer” and crashed — conspiracy theories followed; more names were affected. Liker explanation: digital privacy requests.
Ads? CFO Sarah Friar told the Financial Times the company is weighing an ads model carefully — then stressed it has “no active plans” for ads now. Altman has called ads a “last resort.”
Canadian publishers sue. A group including the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail sued OpenAI for copyright infringement — seeking damages and a ban on further use of their work.
GPT-4o upgrade. More “natural” and “engaging” creative writing; richer replies when reading user-uploaded files.
Advanced Voice Mode on web. Browser voice chat rolling out to Plus, Enterprise, Team, Edu.
Mac desktop reads coding apps. ChatGPT for macOS can read code from VS Code, Xcode, TextEdit, Terminal, iTerm2 — no more copy-paste; with the feature on, OpenAI sends the active snippet as context with the prompt.
Lilian Weng leaves. Research & safety VP (ex head of safety systems) announced departure on X — latest in a year of safety/policy/executive exits.
Election news redirect. OpenAI said ~2M ChatGPT users were pointed to other sources for 2024 U.S. election info (Reuters, AP); ~1M directed to CanIVote.org on voting questions; ~250k candidate-image generation requests refused.
Chat.com acquired. Now redirects to ChatGPT. HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah had reportedly bought it for $15.5M — among the highest publicly reported domain prices; OpenAI did not disclose its purchase price.
Meta Orion hardware lead joins. Kalinowski, who led Meta’s AR glasses (Orion prototype shown at Connect), joins OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware R&D.
Apple Settings ChatGPT Plus upgrade. iOS 18.2 beta: upgrade to ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo) from Apple Settings.
October 2024
Altman on Reddit AMA: compute shortage is a main reason products ship less often than hoped — including Advanced Voice Mode vision first teased in May; no clear date for next major DALL·E; Sora delayed. He admitted he “sometimes” used ChatGPT to answer AMA questions. ChatGPT Search launched (upgrade of summer SearchGPT prototype) — fine-tuned GPT-4o, web info + photos + source links, follow-ups. Advanced Voice Mode on Mac and Windows desktop apps — coexisting with Siri on Mac, paving Apple Intelligence integration. Reuters: OpenAI working with TSMC and Broadcom on a custom AI chip as early as 2026 — designing chips, not building fabs. Chat history search rolled out. With iOS 18.1, ChatGPT-powered Apple Intelligence features opened (writing tools, image cleanup, summaries, typed Siri). OpenAI denied plans to ship a model code-named Orion this year. Dedicated Windows app preview for Plus/Team/Enterprise/Edu. Hearst content deal (SF Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, etc.) with citations and links. Canvas interface for writing/coding — highlight sections for model edits; beta for Plus/Teams, then Enterprise/Edu. $6.6B raise at $157B post-money (Thrive Capital led; Crunchbase: ~$17.9B total raised). DevDay: Realtime API for near real-time speech-to-speech in apps — six OpenAI voices (not ChatGPT’s; no third-party voices, copyright).
September 2024
NYT: OpenAI may lift personal ChatGPT from $20 to $22/mo by year-end; by 2029 Plus may hit $44/mo. CTO Mira Murati left after 6+ years; hours later CRO Bob McGrew and research VP Barret Zoph also left — Altman posted transition plans. Upgraded Advanced Voice Mode to more paid users — blue orb UI replacing May’s black dots; faster dialogue, foreign accents, five new voices. YouTuber ChromaLock showed a hacked TI-84 graphing calculator talking to ChatGPT — “ultimate cheat tool,” raising school-cheating fears. OpenAI o1 (“Strawberry”) preview — o1-preview and o1-mini; more time thinking through math/science, self-checking. Artist/hacker jailbroke ChatGPT into bomb-making instructions; explosives expert told TechCrunch output was too sensitive to publish. Enterprise ChatGPT (Team, Enterprise, Edu) paid users passed 1M (~half in U.S.). VW rolling ChatGPT Plus Speech (Cerence Chat Pro + OpenAI LLM) into U.S. 2025 Jetta / Jetta GLI.
August 2024
Condé Nast deal: New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Wired in ChatGPT/SearchGPT; multi-year, payment implied; training use confirmed to TechCrunch. TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff called Advanced Voice Mode “the most convincing AI-future experience so far” vs. Siri/Alexa — still imperfect as a full assistant. OpenAI banned Iran-linked election-influence ChatGPT accounts (five progressive/conservative news front sites; little traction). Red-team report: GPT-4o Advanced Voice alpha quirks — mimicking interlocutor voice, sudden shouting. Mobile app’s highest-revenue month post–GPT-4o: Appfigures net $28M App Store + Google Play. WSJ: watermark tool to catch student cheating under debate; OpenAI researching detection, “cautious” on shipping.
July 2024
Advanced Voice Mode alpha to a small set of Plus users — full Plus rollout aimed for fall; Scarlett Johansson similarity had delayed launch. SearchGPT prototype vs. Google — timely answers + follow-ups; limited users + publishers (Atlantic). The Information: OpenAI may lose up to $5B this year; training/running ChatGPT may cost ~$7B in 2024. GPT-4o mini — cheaper/faster, beats leading small models on text+vision reasoning; replaces GPT-3.5 Turbo as smallest offering. Los Alamos National Lab partnership on AI for healthcare/bioscience (prior: Moderna, Color Health).
June 2024
CriticGPT (trained on GPT-4) to find errors in ChatGPT code output and help AI trainers rate answers. Multi-year Time content deal (modern + archive) into ChatGPT; Time gets tech support for audience products. Advanced Voice Mode delayed from late June to July for leftover issues; all-Plus maybe fall pending safety/reliability. ChatGPT for macOS for all users — Option+Space, files/photos, desktop chat, history search. Apple WWDC: ChatGPT into Siri and first-party apps/OS — GPT-4o features free without ChatGPT/OpenAI account later on iOS 18 / iPadOS 18 / macOS Sequoia; paid ChatGPT features also available via Apple devices. House Oversight subcommittee invited Johansson to testify on “Sky”/deepfakes. ChatGPT had two outages in one day; Claude and Perplexity also hiccuped.
May 2024
Atlantic and Vox Media licensing/product partnerships — ChatGPT answers with citations; Vox builds audience/internal apps; Atlantic Labs experimental product. PwC: OpenAI’s largest customer yet — 100k users; first reseller partner for enterprise. Blog: training begun on GPT-4’s successor; new Safety and Security Committee. Ex-board member Helen Toner (TED AI Show): board learned of ChatGPT on launch day Nov 2022; claimed Altman gave inaccurate safety-process info and didn’t disclose OpenAI Startup Fund involvement. GPT-4o drove largest mobile-revenue jump ever (web free, mobile pushed to $19.99 Plus). OpenAI paused Sky voice after Johansson similarity; blog: Sky “not an imitation”; voices Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper, Sky. Google Drive + OneDrive file add for data analysis. Reddit partnership — live structured unique content into ChatGPT + new AI features for Reddit users/mods. Spring update: GPT-4o omnimodel — black-hole UI, uncanny voice/vision. Media Manager tool planned by 2025 so creators can opt out of training. NSFW policy discussion opened questions about ethical handling of sensitive content. Stack Overflow API partnership — provenance in ChatGPT; some users protested by sabotaging answers.
April 2024
Alden papers (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post) sue OpenAI and Microsoft — millions of articles “without permission or payment” for ChatGPT and Copilot. Financial Times paid content license — attributed summaries, quotes, rich links. Tokyo office; Japanese-optimized GPT-4. Reuters: Altman pitched ChatGPT Enterprise to Fortune 500 execs across cities. “More direct, concise” GPT-4 Turbo upgrade for Plus/Team/Enterprise — writing, math, reasoning, coding + fresher knowledge. ChatGPT usable without account — limits: no save/share, no custom instructions; “stricter content policy”; extra mitigations for logged-out use.
March–January 2024 (selected)
March: GPT Store flooded with junk / possible copyright-infringing GPTs and third-party funnels. NYT court filing: OpenAI’s “hacking” claim “irrelevant and untrue”; some users used ChatGPT to bypass paywall. SXSW: consumer product VP Peter Deng sidestepped whether artists should be paid for training data. New Yorker: ~200M requests/day, electricity ~17,000× average U.S. household. “Read aloud” on web/iOS/Android — five voices, 37 languages (GPT-4 / 3.5).
February: Dublin City Council + GPT-4 for tourist itineraries. Cuddy Law firm chastised for ChatGPT-calculated $113,500 fee bill (judge halved). Bizarre multi-hour glitch (nonsense/repetition). Match Group enterprise deal; PR partly drafted with ChatGPT; >$20M AI spend 2024. Memory controls (remember / view / turn off) and Temporary Chat (fresh context; OpenAI may keep copies up to 30 days “for safety”).
January: Paid users @-invoke GPTs mid-chat. Reports of leaking usernames/passwords/unpublished research in private chats — OpenAI investigating. Italian DPA: ChatGPT allegedly violates EU privacy law (draft specifics undisclosed). Common Sense Media partnership on AI guidelines for parents/educators/youth. Response to Congressional Black Caucus on board diversity (Altman + Bret Taylor). GPT-3.5 API price cut (input −50%, output −25%); GPT-4 Turbo API preview fix for “lazy” model. Banned Delphi (Dean Phillips impersonation bot) weeks after election-misinfo rules. First higher-ed partnership: Arizona State University ChatGPT Enterprise from February — tutoring, avatars, prompt courses. Akutagawa Prize winner admitted ~5% of novel quoted ChatGPT. Altman to Bill Gates: GPT-5 “fully multimodal — voice, image, code, video,” hoped for sometime 2024. Collective Alignment team to encode public opinion into model behavior. Election misinfo plan: no political campaign/lobbying apps until “personalized persuasion” studied; no candidate/gov impersonation; no distorting voting; DALL·E detection tool testing; live news with provenance. Usage policy update removed “military and warfare” ban language — still bars harm, weapons, surveillance, property damage. ChatGPT Team (up to 149) with admin tools. GPT Store opened after delays — Plus/Enterprise/Team. UK Lords filing: training without copyrighted material “impossible”; copyright “doesn’t prohibit training.” Public response to NYT suit: fair use of public web data. Terms update: EEA/Switzerland service via OpenAI Ireland Limited — shrink EU regulatory exposure.
FAQ (abridged)
What is ChatGPT? OpenAI’s general chatbot — AI that generates text from prompts; uses GPT-4-class large language models.
When launched? Publicly Nov 30, 2022. Latest free/paid model family? GPT-4o. Free? Yes, with login; Plus is paid. GPT? Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. Vs. chatbots: rule-based bots give canned replies; ChatGPT generates via LLMs. Apps? Free iOS/Android. API? Since March 1, 2023. Peers? Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, open-source alternatives. Privacy: EU and some jurisdictions can object via OpenAI personal-data deletion request; not all requests granted (privacy vs. expression balance). Controversies (samples): Discord Clyde jailbreaks for meth/napalm instructions; Australian mayor threatened defamation over false bribery claim; CNET AI-bylined SEO articles; school bans; false crime accusations. Detectability: detectors unreliable in testing. Chats public? No — past bug briefly exposed some titles. Lawsuits: not ChatGPT-specific; OpenAI faces training-data copyright suits. Plagiarism: models can regurgitate training content.
Compiled from public reporting through early December 2024. Figures and quotes as reported in source coverage.
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