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Comment by pietro72ohboy | Hacker News Reader

Chat models were not invented with ChatGPT. Conversational search and AI was a well-established field of study well before ChatGPT. It is remarkable how many people unfamiliar with the field think ChatGPT was the first chat model. It may be the first widely-popular chat model but it certainly isn’t the first

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Dana Angluin's group were studying chat systems way back in 1992. There even was a conference around conversational AI back then.

Thank you folks for the correction!

Nobody thinks of the idea "chat with computer" as a novel idea. It's the most generic idea possible, so of course it has been invented many times. ChatGPT broke out because of its execution, not the idea itself.

People call the first actually useful thing the first thing, that's not surprising or wrong.

That statement is patently incorrect. While the 'usefulness' of something can be subjective, the date of creation is an absolute, immutable fact.

What you have failed to grasp is that people are not logic machines. "First chatbot" is never uttered to mean the absolute first chatbot – for all they know someone created an undocumented chatbot in 10,000 B.C. that was lost to time – but merely the first chatbot they are aware of.

Normally the listener is able to read between the lines, but I suppose there may be some defective units out there.

It's like arguing over who invented the light bulb or the personal computer. Answers other than "Edison" and "Wozniak", while very possibly more correct than either, will lead to an hours-long argument that changes exactly 0 minds.

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