GPT-3.5

GPT-3.5 is the model that started the modern AI race. On November 30, 2022 OpenAI wrapped it in a simple chat interface called ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users within two months — the fastest-growing consumer application in history at the time. Every release on this tracker's timeline is measured from that day.

Technically a fine-tuned descendant of GPT-3 trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback, GPT-3.5 was quickly surpassed — GPT-4 arrived less than four months later — but its free availability kept it the world's most-used language model well into 2024.

OpenAI never published a benchmark table for GPT-3.5 on its own. The figures on record come from the GPT-4 technical report in March 2023, where GPT-3.5 was the baseline the new model was announced against: 70.0% on MMLU, 57.1% on GSM8K and 48.1% on HumanEval. Those were strong numbers for the moment and are useful now mainly as a starting line — every one of them was a solved problem within two years.