There have been a handful of before-and-after moments in the modern technology era. Everything was one way, and then just like that, it was suddenly obvious it would never be like that again. Netscape showed the world the internet; Facebook made that internet personal; the iPhone made plain how the mobile era would take over. There are others — there’s a dating-app moment in there somewhere, and Netflix starting to stream movies might qualify, too — but not many.

ChatGPT, which OpenAI launched a year ago today, might have been the lowest-key game-changer ever. Nobody took a stage and announced that they’d invented the future, and nobody thought they were launching the thing that would make them rich. If we’ve learned one thing in the last 12 months, it’s that no one — not OpenAI’s competitors, not the tech-using public, not even the platform’s creators — thought ChatGPT would become the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. And in retrospect, the fact that nobody saw ChatGPT coming might be exactly why it has seemingly changed everything.

In the year since ChatGPT launched, it has brought change to practically every corner of the technology industry. In a year otherwise marked by huge decline in venture-capital investing, seemingly any company with “AI” in its pitch deck is able to raise money — $17.9 billion just in the third quarter of this year, according to Pitchbook, and some of the industry’s biggest VC firms are raising huge funds just to keep pouring money into AI.

A few companies already appear to be at the head of the pack: Anthropic is shaping up to be one of OpenAI’s best and most well-funded competitors, Midjourney’s image-generating AI is improving at a remarkable pace, and even just this week Pika appeared out of nowhere with a seriously impressive AI video tool. But whether you like note-taking apps, audio-mixing tools, or easy ways to summarize meetings or books or legal documents, there’s something new and cool launching practically every day.

Meanwhile, all the way at the other end of the tech industry, AI has consumed the biggest companies on the planet. Microsoft, an OpenAI partner and investor, bet big on an AI-powered Bing while also bringing its AI “Copilots” into Office, Windows, Azure, and more. Google, which invented a lot of the foundational technology that is now suddenly everywhere, scrambled to launch Bard and the Search Generative Experience, and built Duet AI into its own workplace products. AI was the centerpiece of Amazon’s announcements this year, from the LLM-powered Alexa to a million new AI tools for AWS customers. Meta now sees AI as a critical part of its future, maybe even more so than the metaverse. AI hardware made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies on earth. Even Apple, which has moved the least aggressively of the tech giants, has begun to talk more about its AI efforts — and might have big plans for Siri coming soon. I could keep going. Call it a boom, call it a bubble, but it’s been a long time since the whole tech world was this obsessed with a single thing.

Make no mistake, though: ChatGPT is the biggest winner of the ChatGPT revolution. It doesn’t look like much — its new audio and image features are neat, but it’s mostly still just a roughly designed chat interface — and it has been plagued by reliability issues, but that didn’t stop its momentum. It had a million users in five days, 100 million after just two months, and now boasts of having 100 million every week.