Maybe you’ve been curious about all the AI buzz but have yet to delve into what it is and how it works.

While there are many tools that fall under the “AI” or “machine learning” category, ChatGPT by OpenAI is the darling of the moment, and the one piece of AI tech every educator should understand. GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and is a computer model that uses neural networking (a system that mimics how neurons speak to one another in the human brain) to complete complex tasks quickly.

It “learns” by a process of trial and error similar to our brains and is able to sort information quickly by connecting to cluster and process data. GPT3, which debuted in 2020 but was released globally as a free demo in November 2022, is a text-to-text, large language model that generates text by analyzing language patterns.

It can create written responses (that’s where the “Chat” part comes in) and stories, link to research, and even write computer code. Its successor, GPT4, which debuted in March 2023, is also a text model, but is also capable of understanding visual input. This means that it can make sense of photographs, videos, or drawings and not just text.

Additionally, ChatGPT4 has greater processing capabilities and is much more multilingual than its predecessor. Both ChatGPT3 and ChatGPT4 are capable of human language and multiple programming languages, which increases their usage. Version 4 can write computer code, and even help you deploy it and create websites.

GTP5, released in August 2025, was billed by OpenAI's Sam Altman as having "Ph.D.-level intelligence." It is geared mainly toward enterprise-tier use and developers, but is avaialbe to anyone.

It seems reasonable to expect that with each new product release in this space, we’ll continue to see algorithmic leaps in capability that will have far-reaching implications for nearly every sector of society.

• 1843 – Ada Lovelace with help from Charles Babbage, creates the Analytical Engine to compute numbers. Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer.
• 1939 – At the Iowa State University, the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) is developed as a programmable digital computer by the inventor and physicist John Vincent Atanasoff with his graduate student Clifford Berry. The computer weighed more than 700 pounds and was capable of solving up to 29 simultaneous linear equations.
• 1950 – Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and proposes the idea of “the imitation game” (later renamed “The Turing Test”).
• 1952 – Arthur Samuels develops the first computer checkers-playing program and the first computer to learn on its own.
• 1957 – Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network enabling pattern recognition based on a two-layer computer learning network.
• 1965 – Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA as an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in the English language on any topic.
• 1988 – Rollo Carpenter develops the chatbot Jabberwacky to “simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner.” This was one of the earliest attempts at creating artificial intelligence through human interaction.
• 1997 – Deep Blue becomes the first computer chess-playing program to beat a reigning world chess champion.
• 2011 – IBM’s Watson, a natural language question-answering computer, participates in Jeopardy! And defeats champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The televised game marked AI’s remarkable move to the center of human conversations.
• 2012 – Google researchers Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng report on an experiment in which they show a very large neural network with 16,000 processors detect cat images without any background information from 10 million unlabeled images randomly taken from youtube videos.
• 2016 – Hanson Robotics introduces Sophia, a humanoid robot, as the first “robot citizen.” With her similarity to an actual human being, ability to see, make facial expressions, and communicate with the help of AI, Sophia was different from those that came before her.
• 2018 – Alibaba develops an AI model that scores better than humans in a Stanford University reading and comprehension test. On a set of 100,000 questions, the AI model scored 82.44 against 82.30 by humans.
• May 2020 – OpenAI’s GPT3 is first introduced, and the beta testing begins the following month. GPT3 is a language model that generates text by adopting algorithms that are pre-trained.
• November 2022 – ChatGPT3 is released as a free demo, which can converse in human-style conversation and generate answers autonomously using large amounts of information from the Internet.
• March 2023 – ChatGPT4 allows multimodal intelligence by adding picture recognition among other things.
• July 2023 – Anthropic launches Claude, and Meta releases LLaMA 2, cementing major alternatives to OpenAI.
• December 2023 – Google DeepMind introduces Gemini 1, a multimodal AI rival to GPT-4.
• February 2024 – Mistral, a European startup, releases powerful open-weight models that rival proprietary systems, strengthening the global open-source AI movement.
• May 2025 – PSEA's Artificial Intelligence Task Force releases its report, titled "Impact Report and Recommendations."
• August 2025 – OpenAI releases ChatGPT-5.
• September 2025 – California passes SB 53, the first U.S. state law regulating frontier AI systems, requiring transparnency and safety frameworks.