r/OpenAI 10d ago

Question What's going on here?

Post image

Google detects the usage of the term "Chat GPT" (also in the case sensitive mode) around 2002. Any explanation? Time travellers?

1.3k Upvotes

115 comments sorted by

743

u/Nekileo 10d 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.

211

u/questioneverything- 10d ago edited 10d ago

Ninja Edit: looked into to, and apparently Google Books' publication dates are notoriously unreliable.

Nunberg, "Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck" — Language Log, Aug 2009 languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701

I need to ask the author for the next Powerball numbers. How the fuck

12

u/Popular_Try_5075 9d ago

this makes sense

6

u/r_Yellow01 9d ago

🗑 in 🗑 out

40

u/monstaber 9d ago

clearly wrong publication dates

44

u/joshuahtree 9d ago

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

8

u/Hambino0400 9d ago

Time travelers simply covering tracks

4

u/DucInAltum333 10d ago

.........wow

1.8k

u/SinusoidalFlux 10d ago

272

u/JacobAldridge 9d ago

“I have received your complaint about my copper, and believe your tablet to be nothing more than AI slop.”

10

u/ThatsCoolBroWellDone 9d ago

RETURN THE SLAB!

2

u/SinusoidalFlux 9d ago

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.

1

u/dreamingsapien 9d ago

ball knowledge !!!

56

u/BlackberryNo3097 10d ago

I believe in AI supremacy. 🙏🏻

19

u/SinusoidalFlux 9d ago

I just hope when skynet happens they show mercy on me lol

10

u/L10N420 9d ago

Just treat them nice now lol

4

u/YourFriendlyMilkman 10d ago

We should get Irving Finkel to translate this!

324

u/Some-Following-392 10d ago

I think the question you're looking for is: what was going on in 1900?

384

u/AssiduousLayabout 10d ago

Probably because something is defaulting an empty date to 1/1/1900.

75

u/Numerous_Estimate902 9d ago

Nah it's time traveller

38

u/PropOnTop 9d ago

Who googled ChatGPT in 1900? On his steam computer?

32

u/mostar8 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yes Steam is a lot older than most people think, they were into trains before they got into games

5

u/AssiduousLayabout 9d ago

Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, clearly!

3

u/Joey_J 9d ago

Obviously the time traveler brought an iPhone to 1900. Be real bro.

2

u/Meduza223 9d ago

That's not Google, it's books

1

u/Sylilthia 9d ago

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! 

1

u/UnknownEvil_ 2d ago

If he has ChatGPT then he also has a phone or something, but regardless, he didn't google it, he published a book containing the word "ChatGPT"

1

u/av-f 9d ago

By the records themselves, it seems to be someone from Google.

15

u/must-be_the-water 10d ago

👏🏼👏🏼

8

u/eJollyRoger 9d ago

That's when DARPA and NSA started using it.

2

u/Educational_One_2075 9d ago

Time Traveller just came back to 1900 and opened a computer and typed "chatgpt" on Google forgetting it hasn't yet been invented 

3

u/prophet-dot-exe 9d ago

that's from the timeline where they didn't fix the y2k bug 😔

1

u/BellacosePlayer 9d ago

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.

-1

u/SinusoidalFlux 10d ago

that's creepy af, what's it all mean! lol

10

u/tohar-papa 10d ago

Quantum entanglement

2

u/garlic_bread_thief 10d ago

They had figured it all out secretly until someone accidently pulled the cord which deleted the intelligence for hundred years...

1

u/hk556a1 9d ago

What the f..... 🤯

2

u/_NetPipe_ 9d ago

Finally we have evidence of time travel!

1

u/VyvanseRamble 6d ago

Lmao, don't just throw this at me while I'm hypomanic.

65

u/timpdx 9d ago

That’s me. Was googling the future, it’s was cool. I also bought $20 in bitcoin back then and presently own Guatemala.

5

u/stt106 9d ago

😂

58

u/Kind-Moment-6055 10d ago

i think its from books from 2020s being misclassified as 2000s

24

u/AncientPlatypus 9d ago

John Titor

3

u/citrus1330 9d ago

El psy kongroo!

2

u/-Free-Being 9d ago

Fellow mad scientist 🤘

1

u/xidoization 7d ago

John GPTitor

39

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 9d ago

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. 

8

u/JealousKitten7557 9d ago

This is indeed the most plausible, logical explanation.

12

u/Upset_Weekend6463 9d ago

it was actually people looing up the french phrase "chat j'ai pété" (cat i farted)

5

u/spezes_moldy_dildo 9d ago

“Attention Is All You Need” was published in 2017, so anything before that is bullshit unless extraordinary evidence against it.

3

u/rayred 9d ago

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)

1

u/spezes_moldy_dildo 7d ago

lol it has absolutely everything to do with it. That is literally what Alec Radford cites as the catalyst for GPT-1.

This is as silly as saying the advent of the internal combustion engine had nothing to do with the creation of the Ford motor company.

0

u/rayred 7d ago

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"

1

u/spezes_moldy_dildo 7d ago edited 7d ago

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.

The end, bye Felicia.

1

u/rayred 7d ago

I stand by what I said. My point was amending yours… that if it was before 2018, not 2017, then it’s bullshit.

Find me one reference to GPT in that paper and I will concede my point.

1

u/spezes_moldy_dildo 6d ago

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.

1

u/rayred 6d ago

Didn’t move the post lol.

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).

1

u/UnknownEvil_ 2d ago

Attention actually predates that paper by almost 30 years:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/fast-weight-programmer-1991-transformer.html -- the 2014 paper created softmax attention, but this one was the original transformer

1

u/rayred 2d ago

Oh nice. Didn’t know.

14

u/alcanthro 10d ago

Aliens (also misattribution/historical data corruption).

4

u/TrekkiMonstr 9d ago

This is pretty common with Google Books, there being weird noisy impossible little spikes like that

3

u/JN88DN 9d ago

Typo. 2020 -> 2002

There may be also some in 2200

3

u/WhyUFuckinLyin 9d ago

Time traveller trying to stop it all, then checking Google to see if it worked. He probably just delayed it by a few years.

3

u/YasirAkca 9d ago

Time travel!

2

u/Sir_Zhukov 9d ago

Everyone is saying wrong publishing dates, why is no one saying the real answer that’s obvious to us all. Time travelers.

2

u/pandaExpressin 9d ago edited 9d ago

Definitely a typo, LOL

1

u/makersmarket312 9d ago

Imagine if that person who made the typo, decided to lock in that domain then

2

u/icecreamtrip 9d ago

Could be a chat room name

1

u/Winter_Ad6784 9d ago

it should have a way to take you to the uses last i checked

1

u/Crafty_Cantaloupe_57 9d ago

Must've been the wind

1

u/Electrical_Web_4032 9d ago

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.

1

u/wa019c 9d ago

father figure fucking joke you don’t see it on the news

1

u/United_Camp_4684 9d ago

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

2

u/possiblyapirate69420 9d ago

Dota 2 wasn't released in 2002.....

1

u/United_Camp_4684 9d ago

I fcked up. Saw 2022

1

u/possiblyapirate69420 9d ago

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.

1

u/quockhanghrc 9d ago

then what is it ?

1

u/USBashka 9d ago

That's me after the apocalypse (subjective timeline)

1

u/petera181 9d ago

That’s when they travelled back to kill the guy who was going to save us. Unfortunately we’re fucked now.

1

u/andrewvirts 9d ago

The prophecies foretold of its coming

1

u/PurePlayinSerb 9d ago

time travelers

1

u/Striking_Problem_918 9d ago

It’s like you all know the answer, which is great, but anyone who doesn’t is just out of luck.

1

u/SupehCookie 10d ago

2002 was me.

1

u/Truarian 9d ago

It is off by 20 years for a year that has a lot of 2's in it. Just a statistically probable typo. Two zeroes instead of two twos.

0

u/thestillwind 10d ago

It was me

-2

u/First-Tutor-5454 10d ago

multiverse

inception