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But this issue far predates their current success. GPT2 was held back for a while. GPT3 launched as "waitlist only" with an application process, and so did GPT3

But this issue far predates their current success. GPT2 was held back for a while. GPT3 launched as "waitlist only" with an application process, and so did GPT3.5. This is a large part of what held them back: GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface. Yet GPT3.5 failed to get any hype because the rollout was glacial. They made some claims that it was great, but to verify this for yourself you had to wait months. Only when they finally made a product that everyone could try out at the same time, with minimal hassle, did OpenAI turn from a "niche research company" to the fastest growing start-up. And this seems to have been a one-time thing, now they are back to staggered releases.

pixl97 3y ago
Turns out that getting enough compute power to meet demand for AI is hard.
MillionOClock 3y ago
> GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface I believe two other factors were the cost (especially of fine tuned models, IIRC fine tuned davinci cost $0.20 per thousand tokens) and also that OpenAI hadn't very clearly shown just how much higher the quality could get once RLHF'd. I remember asking davinci-instruct to parse some data, and the reliability really seemed much lower than ChatGPT at launch, to the point that, at the time, I thought GPT-4 was secretly powering ChatGPT.