GPT-3 is published by a group of 31 engineers and researchers on May 28, 2020
GPT-2 is published in February 2019.
The most foundational paper, "Attention Is All You Need" is published on 12 Jun 2017 and cited more than 60,000 times.
I think ChatGPT is not just an overnight success but rather a cumulative and collective effort of AI and NLP research that has finally reached to a certain threshold.