The Chatbot Revolution Nobody Saw Coming: How AI Assistants Took Over the World
ELIZA (1966) pioneered chatbot pattern matching, followed by PARRY (1972) which mimicked a paranoid patient. The 2010s saw a shift from rule-based chatbots to learning-based ones with neural networks and transformers, highlighted by Google’s BERT (2018) and OpenAI’s GPT series (GPT-3, 2020). GPT-3, with 175 billion parameters, debuted in 2020, and the ChatGPT prototype launched in November 2022, reaching 100 million users in two months. Voice assistants emerged with Siri (2011), Alexa (2014), Cortana (2014), and Google Assistant (2016). Google’s Bard evolved into Gemini in 2024, with Gemini Ultra as the top model, offering multimodal input, 40+ languages, and real-time
