ChatGPT appeared like an explosion on all my social media timelines in early December 2022. While I keep up with machine learning as an industry, I wasn't focused so much on this particular corner, and all the screenshots seemed like they came out of nowhere. What was this model? How did the chat prompting work? What was the context of OpenAI doing this work and collecting my prompts for training data?

I decided to do a quick investigation. Here's all the information I've found so far. I'm aggregating and synthesizing it as I go, so it's currently changing pretty frequently.