I stopped considering ChatGPT to be niche/nerdy phenomenon after, less than two weeks after release, I overheard some random Polish commentary youtubers (the YouTube equivalent of mass market celebrity gossip, except more self-referential) showcasing the chatbot and voicing their opinions about large language models.

One useful thing I learned from this, though, is that ChatGPT can handle Polish just fine. It never even occurred to me to try it - I incorrectly assumed the model was trained on English text only. I suspect that being multilingual from day 1 was a huge factor in ChatGPT's sudden and extreme user growth.