OpenAI staff didn't think ChatGPT would be 'useful' and it almost wasn't released in its current form, cofounder says

• OpenAI staff didn't think ChatGPT would be useful, cofounder Greg Brockman told Forbes.
• "None of us were that enamored by it," he said of the artificially-intelligent chatbot.

OpenAI staff were initially lukewarm about ChatGPT, the artificially-intelligent chatbot that went on to take the world by storm, the company's president has said.

"None of us were that enamored by it," Greg Brockman, also a cofounder of OpenAI, said in an interview with Forbes. "None of us were like, 'This is really useful.'"

OpenAI had put ChatGPT on the back-burner around the time Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, the text-based image-generation AI, started to take off after its release in August, Forbes reported. At that point, OpenAI was focusing on making alternatives to the ChatGPT bot that was ultimately released, Forbes said.

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The company eventually decided to launch ChatGPT to the public at large in November — and people didn't seem to feel the same way about the bot as OpenAI's own staff did. Indeed, a week after launch, ChatGPT had amassed one million users. It's been used in a multitude of creative ways: for writing essays, children's books, and code, among other things.

OpenAI executives have expressed surprise at the chatbot's viral popularity.

In January, Brockman told Fortune that putting ChatGPT out for public use was almost a Hail Mary for the company. He said the decision to release the chatbot was a last resort after a string of internal issues, such as beta testers not knowing what to ask the bot, and a failed attempt to create expert chatbots.

Representatives for OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.