Oh, GPT-3.5, recognizable in so many old screenshots by the green icon. If ever a popular model deserved the term "stochastic parrot", it was GPT-3.5. I wonder what percentage of people today still base their opinions of AI capabilities on their experiences with that model. That model was the only option for free ChatGPT users for the first year and a half of ChatGPT's existence, from November 2022 to May 2024.

GPT-3.5 was so nice because the safeguards were so easy to bypass and it wasn't lobotomized by RLHF. Newer models really don't hit the same spot and I'm not sure what I liked so much about that initial release. I look back at conversation logs I saved and I just can't replicate them nowadays.