In mid-2022, I typed a prompt into platform.openai.com and got back something that didn't feel like a demo.
It was text-davinci-002. Before ChatGPT, before the hype. But it wasn't the output that mattered. It was the feeling: this is going to break everything we know about building AI products.
Building a good AI model meant collecting data, training, and fine-tuning for specific tasks. Hard, slow, expensive work. Davinci-002 could do a rough version of most of it with just a prompt — plain English, no data, no training, no cost.
My co-founders and I were already building softly, an AI startup. A few months later, ChatGPT launched and everyone else felt it too.