Two years ago, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a revolutionary AI chatbot that was initially met with skepticism. Today, ChatGPT has become a $4 billion revenue engine with 300 million weekly active users, despite still struggling with accuracy and reliability issues. In an exclusive interview, the team behind ChatGPT shares the story of its humble beginnings, its rapid growth, and its future plans.

The idea of ChatGPT was born in December 2021, when the OpenAI team began working on a project called WebGPT, an AI tool that could search the internet and write answers. The team took inspiration from WebGPT's conversational interface and began plugging it into GPT-3.5, a successor to the GPT-3 text model released in 2020. They gave it the clunky name "Chat with GPT-3.5" until, in a split-second decision, they simplified it to ChatGPT.

Despite early concerns about chatbots being a dead end, the team decided to launch ChatGPT in November 2022, with a "low-key research preview" and a single tweet from CEO Sam Altman. The launch was met with mixed emotions, with users in Japan flooding the site and causing it to crash just hours after launch. The team was caught off guard, with dashboards constantly displaying error messages.

However, the initial chaos soon gave way to rapid growth, with ChatGPT surpassing its most ambitious 1-million-user target within five days of launch. Two months after its debut, ChatGPT garnered more than 30 million users. The team started rolling out updates incorporating user feedback, and the initial skepticism gave way to widespread adoption.

Today, OpenAI is focused on figuring out what the future of ChatGPT looks like. The team is working on improving accuracy, speed, and presentation, with plans to move beyond the chatbot interface and create agents that can perform complex, multistep tasks autonomously. The goal is to create an entity that users can trust to work for them, with systems like OpenAI's "reasoning" line of models creating a trail of checkable steps explaining their logic.

Despite the challenges and controversies surrounding ChatGPT, the team remains committed to its vision of creating a more useful and reliable AI tool. With a new $200 pro tier and a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT with iOS and macOS, OpenAI is poised to reach millions more users and further cement its position as a leader in the AI industry.

As the stakes continue to rise, OpenAI is racing to build agents that can perform complex tasks autonomously, while navigating the complexity of a new US president and his AI czar. With billions more dollars in funding expected in 2025, the company will likely look very different by ChatGPT's third anniversary next year. One thing is certain, however: ChatGPT has already rewritten the rules of the tech industry, and its impact will be felt for years to come.