- Date
- November 30, 2022
- Kind
- AI release
- Significance
- Transformative
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public as a “research preview” at chat.openai.com, describing it as a model that “interacts in a conversational way”. OpenAI’s own wording was that it interacts in a conversational way.
How it was received
TechCrunch’s anniversary piece, listed below, looks back at how quickly it grew. We do not repeat user-count figures here because we did not confirm them against a primary source.
Why this date appears on a martech timeline
ChatGPT was the starting point for AI assistants as a place where people ask questions and get one written answer instead of a list of links. Several later entries on this timeline follow directly from that shift.
Why it matters
It created the channel that answer engine optimization, AI-assistant advertising and AI marketing agents are all responding to. Marketers who relied on search results as the way customers find them now also have to ask how an assistant describes their brand.
What happened next
In 2026 OpenAI began running advertising in ChatGPT (see the ChatGPT Ads entry), and vendors have launched tools to measure how brands appear in AI answers.