Man, I was watching on YouTube about how ChatGPT just blew up in popularity and now everyone's talking about AI. But is this really such a huge shift in tech history, or is it just hype? I wanted to understand the historical context behind it better.
ChatGPT hit one million users in two weeks when it launched in November 2022, something no app had ever done before, and that created a snowball effect because suddenly people could talk to AI naturally, without needing any technical knowledge. Before that AI had existed for years but it was specialist stuff or hidden away in social media algorithms - now it became accessible to anyone with a browser, and that's what really changed everything.
The thing is, it wasn't really 2024 that exploded - it was more the period between late 2022 and 2023! ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and became an instant craze, but what people are seeing now in 2026 is just the consolidation of all that - companies finally managed to integrate AI into real products that people use in their everyday lives, instead of just being a fascinating chatbot that folks tested out of curiosity. It's not empty hype, no - it's really a huge shift in the history of technology, comparable maybe to the internet in the 90s, but it happened way faster because the infrastructure already existed. What changed was that the models got good enough and cheap enough to leave the lab and actually enter people's lives.
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