ChatGPT
OpenAI's flagship conversational AI, the benchmark for professional-task automation and credential-replacing productivity tools.
ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November 2022, reached 100 million users within two months and has since become economists' reference point for dating when AI began reshaping US hiring and employment patterns.
Last refreshed: 22 September 2026 · Appears in 2 active topics
As ChatGPT enters broadcast discovery layers, which platform deploys it without an Article 50 label posture?
Timeline for ChatGPT
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Media's AI PivotBackground
ChatGPT is OpenAI's large language model-powered conversational product, first released in November 2022. It reached 100 million users within two months, the fastest consumer product to that threshold in history, and its current iteration, GPT-4o, extends the original text interface to voice, vision and reasoning tasks.
In the wider AI-jobs debate, ChatGPT functions as the public benchmark for what general-purpose AI can do inside credentialled professional work. It has passed the bar exam at roughly the 90th percentile and scored above the average human on the CFA Level I exam, results economists cite when assessing which professions face the most direct displacement risk from AI.
That benchmark status means ChatGPT's capabilities, rather than any single deployment, anchor a running argument among economists and regulators over how much of the current wave of white-collar disruption in law, finance and other credential-dependent fields is genuinely attributable to AI rather than to unrelated cost-cutting.
Economists date AI harm to its launch
ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 has become the dividing line economists use to test whether AI actually caused later job losses. A New York Fed study published on 14 May 2026 found the decline in AI-exposed job postings had begun before ChatGPT's launch, undercutting a simple before-and-after AI narrative.
An earlier IMF staff study reached a similar caveat, finding employment in AI-vulnerable occupations ran 3.6% lower after five years in high-AI regions while noting the decline predated ChatGPT in some sectors. The product's release date, not any single deployment, has become the reference point the wider jobs-AI debate measures against.
How is ChatGPT being used in media and publishing?
How many people use ChatGPT?
What is ChatGPT's competition from European AI?
What professional exams has ChatGPT passed?
Has ChatGPT actually caused job losses?
Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Updated 22 September 2026. Editorial standards.