ChatGPT: The Product that Actually Changed the World

The Fastest-Growing Consumer Product in the Tech History

One of the hardest parts of writing a deep dive like this is coming up with a headline that isn’t clickbait, grabs the reader’s attention, and makes them curious enough to click. It gets even trickier because the deep dive has to be sent via email—one bad word choice and the piece lands straight in the spam folder.

And this is why I “Sometimes” use ChatGPT to tackle this.

When unsure, what the title of the piece should be, I just go to ChatGPT and chat with it back and forth until I find a great headline that ChatGPT and I both agree on. This single-handedly saves me a ton of time and mental energy.

Interestingly, I did the same thing for this deep dive.

But here’s the thing: Before ChatGPT, did you know what tools writers, marketers, or authors would use to analyze the headline quality score? Mostly, there were hundreds of headline analyzer tools that'd help you find perfect headlines based on the quality score. However, the problem was, they’d sometimes work, sometimes not.

Let me explain.

When I ask ChatGPT, “Why do you think this headline is great?” ChatGPT has to give me a reasonable answer, and I can still agree or disagree. On top of that, I can keep asking for headlines until I find one that perfectly fits.

Now, the problem with those headline analyzer tools was that you couldn’t actually talk to them. They were mostly pretrained tools with limited resources. So if they showed, “This headline has a 78% quality score,” There was no way to find out how much truth there was.

Surprisingly, ChatGPT took their jobs.

This one simple use case shows how transformative ChatGPT is for humans. And truth be told, it’s one of the revolutionary products ever created by people for people—from students to writers to programmers to scientists to musicians to politicians benefit from using ChatGPT.

And for this reason, I can also certainly say, if you work in the tech industry—building products, investing in companies, or writing about the business of technology, there is no way you’re not using ChatGPT or other similar AI tools for your work—It’s almost impossible.

If that sounds relatable to you, it’s worth understanding and learning more about one of the most dominant AI tools, ChatGPT. So this deep dive is an attempt to help you understand ChatGPT's humble beginning, its growth timeline, and how it changed the world for the better. If you always wanted to learn more about ChatGPT, you’re welcome.

Get your popcorn ready, and let’s dive in!

The Birth

ChatGPT’s parent company is OpenAI, which was founded 10 years ago in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others. The company was set up as a non-profit (now for-profit!) to ensure that AI (Artificial Intelligence) benefits all of humanity and advances digital intelligence in a way that is safe and aligns with human values.

One of its co-founders, Elon Musk, was already rich and was essentially funding OpenAI in the early days. But just two years after founding the company, the values among co-founders didn’t align, Elon had had enough, so he wrote this email to his peers:

Now this was way, way before ChatGPT came on the market. Sam Altman, who later founded ChatGPT, was previously the CEO of YCombinator, a famous startup firm. But in 2019, he left YC to fully commit to OpenAI. At this point, pretty much you can say, OpenAI was “Nothing” in the market—they hadn’t had any breakthrough products, nor were they “Very” famous.

But they had built this model called GPT. GPT-1 one released in 2018, GPT-2 was in 2019, and GPT-3 was in 2020. And at this point, the company just had 250 employees, but something had to change, something had to explode, you know.

So guess what? OpenAI released a new product they never thought would break the internet, ChatGPT, in November 2022. Though it was first introduced as a “Research Preview” because they weren’t sure how people would use it, and more so because they wanted to gather user feedback and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the product.

OpenAI was not so certain if people would use a product like ChatGPT, but guess what? The market (and people!) had never seen a product like ChatGPT before, so as soon as it came out on the market, people couldn’t wait to use the tool. Because the idea of having an AI chatbot that answers all your questions in seconds (not minutes!) was so, so revolutionary.

CEO, Sam tweeted this:

Link to Tweet

It worked so well. If you check Sam's above tweet and scroll the comment section, all you’ll find is people talking about how revolutionary and game-changing the product is going to be. People clicked on the link Sam provided, asked ChatGPT their desired question, and literally posted screenshots saying, “This will change the world.”

The word of mouth started to spread like wildfire.

The Explosion

There is this line that I really love, it goes like this: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” This was literally the case with ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s growth since its inception is all organic—it has grown by people sharing, recommending, and talking about ChatGPT to others—word of mouth.

Within the 5 days of launch, ChatGPT gained one million users—all thanks to widespread sharing on social media. The growth continued and in 2 months, ChatGPT gained 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer product in tech history.

Link to Image

What took many companies several years to reach 100 million users, ChatGPT gained in just two months. This was a remarkable growth that the tech industry had never seen before. The growth became a snowball effect—the more ChatGPT grew, the more it grew.

As I’m writing this, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has publicly said that “Something like 10% of the world uses our systems.” 10% is like 800+ million users, which means very close to reaching 1 billion registered users. This is a very impressive number given the time it took (2.5 years?) to get there.

The company has raised billions of dollars—a whopping $57.9 billion over 11 rounds from 52 investors, with their latest funding that helped secure the company $40 billion, valuing OpenAI at $300 billion on March 31, 2025.

This growth ain’t gonna stop anytime soon:

Link to Tweet

Inspiring Innovation

It’s truly remarkable how ChatGPT’s success inspired hundreds of thousands of companies and people to start something new in the AI space. Because the brutal truth is: not so many people and companies have the courage to bet on new technology and the future.

The reason? Betting on a new technology doesn't just sucks in the beginning, but also it’s damn hard as you have to convince people why the “Thing” you’re working on matters and why people should care about it. And doing so is certainly not easy. This is why most people would rather build something that already works than try something new.

Name a company that was actively working, really hard on AI before ChatGPT? I don’t think there was. But after seeing ChatGPT’s success, everyone started to get their hands dirty in the AI space, which is awesome by the way.

Let’s see a few examples:

• Cursor: Launched in 2023

• ElevenLabs: Launched in 2023

• Mistral: founded on April 23, 2023

• Claude AI: Launched in March 2023

• Meta’s Llama: Released in February 2023

• Google’s Gemini: Released in March 2023

Do you see the pattern? Once something works, it’s easier for companies to copy and try their hand at building similar products in the same industry. And this is exactly what ChatGPT did—it indirectly helped release probably millions of AI tools and products since its inception.

And then there are people and companies that started using ChatGPT in their work (could be included as a new innovation because they started using this new technology in their work). For example:

#1: Customer Service: Companies leverage ChatGPT to automate responses and common customer queries. This saves them a ton of time and resources just because of the existence of the tool.

#2: Content Creation: It’s an everyday story that companies are firing entry-level copywriters and writers because ChatGPT can do those things with more accuracy and bring better results.

#3: Content Creation: Students use ChatGPT as their personal assistant that helps them solve the problem they have without having to waste hours researching and thinking about the subject matter.

#4: Creative Tasks: If your task is creative, for example, video shooting, scripting, storytelling, ChatGPT can help you do that or guide you on how to do that. And this is what companies and people use ChatGPT for without hiring an expensive team.

#5: Coding: Instead of manually writing every line of code, now people and businesses use ChatGPT’s Models to train and code in their systems.

The world has changed for the better.

The Paradigm Shift

It always surprises me how little we now use Google for small queries. I’m not sure if this might be the case for you, but if I want to know “Why Stripe acquired Bridge?” I’ll not go on Google, instead I’ll ask the question to ChatGPT or similar AI tools. Why? Doing so helps me get the right answer in less time. And it’s not just because ChatGPT is more convenient, but more so because I can ask follow-up questions to it, which Google doesn’t allow on its Search Page.

Google loses the game here.

On X, many have also explicitly said that they have almost stopped using Google because of the existence of these AI tools—ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Grok, Claude AI. For example, look at this tweet:

However, I would not say I’ve completely stopped using Google, actually, there are cases when I find Google Search more useful. But I’d also add that my time spent playing with AI chatbots has only gone up, which means time spent searching on Google has only gone down.

Trump famously said, “Everything's computer.” It’s true, but now to take it one step further, I’d say “Everything is going to be AI.” As we progress, we’ll see more and more AI tools and products coming out in the market and disrupting the existing models.

Now tell me if this sounds relatable to you?...

For general things you no longer search on Google, you simply open any of the AI tools you have on your phone, ask the question, and get the answer in no time without any distractions.

If you’re a programmer and need help with coding, you open any of the AI chatbots and tell the problem you’re having, and they instantly give you the solution in no time. No more time finding online communities on Google.

If you’re a student who needs help with your assignment or project, you no longer call your favorite teacher, because these AI tools solve all the queries you have without saying “You’re dumb.” Or, no more time lurking on phishing websites that try to scam you instead of giving the answers.

If you’re a doctor, and you encounter a specific type of problem your patient is having, you don’t ask your seniors about it, you ask these AI chatbots, and they almost always give you the right answers.

There are many examples like this. The world is changing.

The Future

If you had told me 20 years ago that we’d live in an era like this, I’d have laughed at you hard. Because the reality is, let alone 20 years ago, nothing seemed possible 5 years ago. All the progress we have seen so far—has been made in the last few years. But from here, AI and technology will continue to get better as we progress.

There are so many new technologies that have yet to arrive in the market and disrupt the existing model. But wait! Ever wondered why everyone has suddenly started building AI companies or a product that is “AI-powered?” Because the thing is, nobody wants to get left behind.

Nothing wrong with following the trend and betting on the new technology. But don’t fall for the trap, don’t just build an “AI” company in the hope that you’ll sell it once the AI bubble is burst. Instead, build a (AI) company because you want your legacy to last forever.

Thanks for reading, catch you on the next one.

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