In brief: The end of the year is approaching, and that means plenty of year-in-review lists. Wikipedia likes to collate its most popular articles over the last twelve months, and the most viewed item of 2023 should come as little surprise to readers: it's ChatGPT's entry.
While it first officially launched on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT has been the leader in 2023's AI revolution. The fastest-growing consumer application in history celebrated its one-year birthday recently with over 100 million users.
The Wikimedia Foundation writes that the English-language Wiki article for ChatGPT attracted between 100,000 and 400,000 visitors nearly every day during the first half of the year. The foundation also registered 78 million pageviews of ChatGPT articles across all languages, while the English ChatGPT entry has just under 50 million total views. The recent chaos at developer OpenAI in which CEO Sam Altman was ousted and then returned likely brought more views to the pages.
Wikipedia isn't the only place that illustrates how 2023 has been the year of AI. Collins Dictionary crowned the initialism as its word of the year thanks to the tech's rapid development and the fact it's one of the most talked-about subjects over the last 12 months.
Wikipedia's most popular article of the year tends to reflect whatever is in the public consciousness at the time. Thanks to the massive popularity of the Netflix series, last year's most-viewed article was the entry for notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Sitting behind ChatGPT as the second-most-popular Wikipedia article is Deaths of 2023, which lists all the notable deaths that occurred across the year by month. It's followed by the 2023 Cricket World Cup (38,171,653 page views) and Indian Premier League (32,012,810 views), which is a cricket league. The sport is incredibly popular in that part of the world; in May, Indian service JioCinema broke the streaming world record for a live event with a cricket tournament finale that attracted 32 million simultaneous viewers.
The fifth most popular Wiki article of the year was for the Oppenheimer film, which attracted 28.3 million views. The physicist's own page was 7th on the list with 25.6 million views.