via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

Society tends to peg the “birth” of a new technology as the point when it becomes readily usable. By that measure, generative artificial intelligence was “born” with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Public engagement with generative AI is therefore less than four years old. In that time, it has amassed more than a billion users, and the companies selling AI technology have come to dominate the headlines, the stock market, and public consciousness.

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