All you need to know about ChatGPT, the A.I. chatbot that’s got the world talking and tech giants clashing
All you need to know about ChatGPT, the
A.I. chatbot that’s got the world talking and tech giants clashing
What is ChatGPT? I asked the buzzy
artificial intelligence chatbot, which has ignited conversation in schools,
corporate boardrooms and social media, to explain itself.
In its own description, ChatGPT is “an
AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pretrained
Transformer) language model. It uses deep learning techniques to generate
human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner.”
The tool is the talk
of the business world. It has been mentioned on earnings calls by
management from a range of companies including oil giants, banks — and even the
industrial behemoth Caterpillar.
It has also sparked concerns over
potential abuses. In classrooms, students have used ChatGPT to generate entire
essays, while hackers have begun testing it to write malicious code.
So what is ChatGPT, exactly? Here’s a
simple guide on all you need to know about the popular AI chatbot.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by San
Francisco-based startup OpenAI. OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and
Sam Altman and is backed by well-known investors — most
notably Microsoft.
It is one of several examples of generative
AI. These are tools that allow users to enter written prompts and receive
new human-like text or images and videos generated by the AI.
Prior examples include Dall-E,
a text-to-image program from OpenAI that garnered attention from people
captivated by its ability to come up with realistic, often absurd, pictures
that match people’s text descriptions.
Lensa, an app based on open-source AI
project Stable Diffusion, has been used to turn selfies into illustrious
self-portraits inspired by everything from sci-fi to anime.
In ChatGPT’s case, the service is a
text-based tool that can produce human-like responses to user requests — from
poetry in the style of William Shakespeare to advice on what to do for a
child’s birthday party.
What’s so special about it?
ChatGPT is powered by a large language
model, or LLM, meaning it’s programmed to understand human language and
generate responses based on large corpora of data.
ChatGPT’s LLM is called GPT-3.5. It is an
upgrade of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model.
With a whopping 175 billion parameters,
GPT-3 is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to
date.
What makes ChatGPT so impressive is its
ability to produce human-like responses, thanks in no small part to the vast
amounts of data it is trained on.
“What’s exciting is that the responses are
more and more human-like, so what you’re seeing is things that we did not think
computers could do before,” Jeffrey Wong, global chief innovation officer at
professional services firm EY, told CNBC.
Another thing that differentiates ChatGPT
is its ability to log context from users’ earlier messages in a thread and use
it to form responses later in the conversation.