Era IV · 2022–2023
The Consumer-LLM Bloom
By C.W. Jameson · Published 19 May 2026 · Last reviewed 19 May 2026
In the year following ChatGPT's release the field went from one major commercial model to four. GPT-4, Claude 1 and 2, Bard, and Llama all arrived inside twelve months. Pricing dropped by an order of magnitude. The first generation of LLM-native startups raised at meaningful valuations. Operators got used to switching providers monthly.
GPT-4
Released 14 March 2023. The technical report was famously thin on architectural detail. The capability was substantial — bar exam, AMC, AP exams, all comfortably above the human percentile. The cost was punitive at launch and dropped repeatedly through the year.
Claude 2
July 2023, with the then-unprecedented 100K token context window. Operators who had been splitting prompts across calls suddenly had room. The voice of the model (calmer, hedged, more deliberate) became a recognisable trait.
Llama 2
July 2023, Meta's first commercially-licensed open-weights release. The Llama 2 chat fine-tunes set the open-weights baseline for the year that followed. Every serious open-weights derivative until Llama 3 traced back to it.
Signature models of the era
- GPT-4
- Claude 2
- Bard / Gemini 1
- Llama 2
Technical shifts
- Context windows pass 100K tokens
- Open-weights catch within striking distance of frontier on instruction-following
- Function-calling APIs ship across all major providers
Market shifts
- The first $100M+ revenue LLM-native startups
- Anthropic raises at $4.1B; OpenAI raises at $29B
- The 'race to zero' on input pricing begins
Authentication — is the document from this era?
| Tell | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Mentions GPT-4 by name without a version suffix | Document dates to 2023 or early 2024 when 4 was unmodified. |
Agents catalogued in this era
- Mistral 7B — The model that proved 7B parameters could beat 13B models. Reshaped expectations for small open models.
- Claude 2 — Anthropic's first publicly competitive release. 100K context when GPT-4 had 8K.
Primary sources
- [1] OpenAI: GPT-4 Technical Report — 2023-03-15
- [2] Anthropic: Claude 2 — 2023-07-11
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