When did ChatGPT come out?
ChatGPT was released publicly on 30 November 2022, announced by OpenAI as a free research preview of a model fine-tuned from the GPT-3.5 series. It was not sold, not positioned as a product, and not expected to become one — the announcement framed it as a way to learn from real use. As of August 2026 it is three years and nine months old, and almost nothing about the current product except the name dates from that day.
- Public release
- Nov 30, 2022 as a research preview
- Age today
- 3 yr 9 mo as of Aug 2026
- Model at launch
- GPT-3.5 series fine-tuned sibling of InstructGPT
- Price at launch
- Free no paid tier existed
- First release note
- Dec 15, 2022 "ChatGPT Dec 15 Version"
- Free model today
- GPT-5.6 Luna four generations later
- Paid tiers today
- Go, Plus, Pro plus Business and Enterprise
- Verified
- 2026-08-21 OpenAI sources
One date, checked two ways.
OpenAI's own announcement — Introducing ChatGPT, still published at openai.com/index/chatgpt/ — describes a model trained to interact conversationally, able to answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests. It states that ChatGPT is a sibling of InstructGPT, that it was fine-tuned from a GPT-3.5-series model which finished training in early 2022, that it was trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, and that "during the research preview, usage of ChatGPT is free". OpenAI has since added a banner to the top of it: this post introduced ChatGPT in 2022, and ChatGPT has evolved substantially since then.
How we dated it. We read that announcement directly, and it establishes the launch and its terms — but the extracted page did not carry its own publication date, so we corroborated 30 November 2022 against a source we can date precisely: OpenAI's ChatGPT release notes, whose earliest entry is 15 December 2022 and tells users to look for "ChatGPT Dec 15 Version" at the bottom of the screen. A changelog that opens two weeks after a 30 November launch is consistent; one starting before it would not be.
That first release note is a good measure of how far the product has travelled. Its headline features were: the model becoming less likely to refuse to answer questions, the gradual rollout of conversation history so you could revisit past chats, and an experiment with a daily message cap. Saved conversations were a new feature in December 2022.
Today the same changelog covers agentic work in ChatGPT Work, a Codex coding surface, image generation and editing, meeting transcription, advertising, and a model picker with four reasoning levels. The launch date is a fixed point; almost every other fact about ChatGPT has been replaced at least once since.
"Came out" has four different answers.
30 November 2022 — the day anyone could use it. This is the date to quote in an essay, a slide or a pub argument, and it is the date OpenAI's own announcement carries.
Worth knowing that it launched as a research preview rather than a product. There was no paid tier, no app, no API for it, and no expectation of the reception it got. Much of what people now criticise about the product's stability and shifting limits traces back to that: it was a demonstration that became infrastructure.
A good share of this cluster searches when was ChatGPT invented, which the launch date does not really answer. The model behind it was fine-tuned from the GPT-3.5 series, which OpenAI says finished training in early 2022 — so the thing existed before the interface did.
Push further back and you leave ChatGPT entirely: GPT-3 in 2020, the transformer architecture in 2017, and decades of prior work. "Invented" has no single date; released does, and it is 30 November 2022.
If the real question is how old is the thing I am talking to, the answer is months, not years. Free accounts currently run GPT-5.6 Luna; paid tiers reach GPT-5.6 Sol. Models that felt current not long ago have been retired outright from ChatGPT — GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o4-mini in February 2026, GPT-5.1 in March, GPT-5.2 in June, GPT-4.5 in June, o3 on 26 August 2026.
This matters for anyone citing ChatGPT in written work: the model that produced your answer may not exist by the time someone checks it. Our page on citing ChatGPT covers how to record that properly.
Around 31,000 people a month still ask when ChatGPT came out, nearly four years after it did. That is not idle curiosity — it is homework, journalism, slide decks and the endless business of dating the moment this technology arrived in public.
Which is precisely why the date deserves a source rather than a confident sentence. Ours carries two, and says openly that we could not open one of them directly.
Other moments in the same story.
The launch date rarely stands alone — people asking it usually want one of these next. Each links to a page where the fact is sourced and dated, rather than to a summary of it.
Frequently asked.
Quick follow-ups people search after this question.