section_path: Reception
section_name: Reception
paragraph_text: Reception
  
  ChatGPT was widely assessed in December 2022 as having some unprecedented and powerful capabilities. Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public". Samantha Lock of The Guardian noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. In The Atlantic magazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is". Kelsey Piper of Vox wrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten" and that ChatGPT is "smart enough to be useful despite its flaws". Paul Graham of Y Combinator tweeted: "The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Something big is happening."
  
  In February 2023, Time magazine placed a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT on its cover, writing that "The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything" and "The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying".
  
  ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history. OpenAI engineers said they had not expected ChatGPT to be very successful and were surprised by the coverage it received.
  
  Google responded by hastening the release of its own chatbot. Their leaders emphasized their earlier caution regarding public deployment was due to the trust the public places in Google Search. In December 2022, Google executives sounded a "code red" alarm, fearing that ChatGPT's question-answering ability posed a threat to Google Search, Google's core business. Google's Bard launched on February 6, 2023, one day before Microsoft's announcement of Bing Chat. AI was the forefront of Google's annual Google I/O conference in May. The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft.