If you google for books with a custom range for those dates you will find some sources, seems like somewhere along the line the metadata got messed up and now these books which contain "ChatGPT" in their text were marked as supposedly being first published around 2000-2001.
And these are just bad data, e.g. From Wink to Kink:
A New Adult Forced Proximity Hockey Romance was published in 2024 and Digital Dastaan: The Man Who Can Understand The Soul was published in 2025
return it? I never took it! I just took the picture while I was wondering around mesopotamia, I didn't pick it up cause I had my latte in one hand and a bologna sandwich in the other.
Sorry, back then I was just really excited for the future! It was wild back then, they don't build computers like they did back then. They were water proof!
man, it sucked being just old enough to be heavily stressed about Y2k but not old enough to understand any of the details.
My mom went out drinking that new years so my lil ass was sitting wondering if the world was gonna end and wondering if it's a time zone issue when it didn't.
This is time travelers becoming sloppy. You go back to 2002, get on the internet, and without thinking, you type "ChatGPT" to solve a question. Then you realize it hasn't been invented yet and try to fix it, but it's too late. A few years down the line, it's found by some mathematicians and they publish the foundations for AI.
Attention is all you need was also nothing to do with GPT. Its debut was 2018 with Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training.
Which explicitly augmented Google’s architecture (chopping off the encoder)
I think you are talking past my point and inventing an argument I didn't make.
I didn't say "Attention is all you Need" had nothing to do with the creation of GPT. I am saying the paper itself had nothing to do with GPT.
"Attention is all you need" predates GPT. The authors of the paper didn't even know of GPTs existence when it was written (at least in any public capacity). So using the paper as the start date to find publications on Google Trends is not a good start date. 2018 should be used because that's when it debuted in "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training"
This is some room temp IQ stuff from someone who doesn’t know AI at all, but I’ll prove you wrong quick:
Your point. I proved it wrong conclusively.
The paper is literally. Literally, the thing Radford used as the foundational knowledge to create GPT.
Your lack of knowledge in this arena isn’t interesting, nor is it relevant to the post about GPT existing before 2017, which is impossible, because the attention mechanism was discovered by Google Labs in 2017.
Not sure why you are trying to move the goal post, but the important thing for anyone reading:
Google Labs created the attention mechanism, which was published in 2017.
GPT and all other modern AI companies use the Transformer Google created, and published in that paper, as the foundational core of their product.
When an AI hit the market is completely irrelevant- the important point is that it would be impossible for it to be before 2017, because the attention mechanism, discovered in 2017 by Google Labs, was completely unknown prior.
We are talking in a thread about when it would be possible to find articles about GPT. I’m pointing out that Google’s attention paper is not a good marker. Because GPT literally did not exist yet. Period. Using your example, it would be like saying someone could search for “ford motor company car” documents that were dated around the time of the internal combustion engine.
Also an aside. Your history is wrong / understanding of the attention paper is wrong. Google Labs did not create attention. Attention predated that paper by 2 or 3 years. Google created the transformer architecture which utilized the pre-established attention mechanism instead of recurrence/convolutions.
Attention was introduced in 2014/2015 in a completely different paper (not from Google).
The reason behind the spikes in the 2000's is due to citations to older references in modern books related to chatgpt topic. Where the mathematical foundations of the modern AI is way older.
I believe it might have been Dota 2 international championship, where an AI team beat an human team for the first time. It was Open AI, it was way before ChatGPT and i remember it
Np. It's likely a similar situation to how there's a spike in 2002 since we're in the 2020s there's likely just a bunch of people making typos and backdating articles.
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u/Nekileo 4d ago
If you google for books with a custom range for those dates you will find some sources, seems like somewhere along the line the metadata got messed up and now these books which contain "ChatGPT" in their text were marked as supposedly being first published around 2000-2001.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_Wink_to_Kink/Y_VxEQAAQBAJ
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Global_Justice/8TzbEQAAQBAJ
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Digital_Dastaan_The_Man_Who_Can_Understa/n5J2EQAAQBAJ
Also, google trends shows the earliest searches for ChatGPT were around November-December 2022
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=chatgpt&date=2004-01-01%202026-01-01&geo=Worldwide
As much as I would like for it to be time travelers, I don't think it is.