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Before understanding what ChatGPT is, its important to understand what GPT is. GPT or generative pre trained transformers, are neural networks based on transformer architecture, details of which maybe too complex and hence are beyond scope of this article. GPTs are pre trained on large amounts of unlabeled text and are able to generate novel human like content. OpenAI company has released a series of prominent GPT models in a series each one being significantly more powerful and feature rich than its predecessor. Latest in series is GPT 4 which powers the paid ‘ChatGPT plus’.
ChatGPT is based off GPT 3 or 3.5 model specifically fine tuned for instruction following by applying various supervised and reinforcement learning techniques on top of base GPT model. Note the supervised and reinforcement part involves human involvement to train the model. It enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used.
ChatGPT or GPT 3 has been trained on the public data available on the internet until 2021 so it is a bit outdated. Note it might change depending on when you read this article. But for now, you cannot expect it to answer any current question.
Note that ChatGPT is not the only GPT based chatbot in existence. It’s just the most famous one. There are others like Google’s Bard, Facebook or Meta’s LLaMa etc. among others. Interestingly, the GPTs are based off Transformer architecture which was proposed by Google. But OpenAI was able to bring the proper product to market first, and it became the fastest growing software application in hisotry with 100 million users in first 2 months (Compare that with around 4–5 years for Facebook and Twitter, 1.5 years for YouTube, 9 months for TikTok and 18 years for netflix).
OpenAI, the parent company, maintains filtering control for legal or ethical reasons. It has been trained to avoid answering any non ethical, illegal, financial advice or medical advice type questions. By advice I mean it would not tell you which stocks to buy today or which medicine to take for your described symptoms, but can provide you a wealth of information about stocks trading or diseases in general. Similarly it would refuse writing angry or rude content like emails for you.
Please note that ChatGPT knowledge is built by crawling the public internet. So its answers are as good as information available on internet. This means there is no guarantee of truthfulness to its output.
ChatGPT is nothing but a predictive model and as a good quote goes, has knowledge but not wisdom. It has the amazing ability to come up with correct prioritization of words and tokens leading to sentences and paragraphs to output given a natural language input. It can also incorporate context and your chat history to update its response accordingly. It has the ability to generate consistent vs varying output given same input. But at same time, it can generate totally fabricated, but really realistic looking nonsense if it encounters an unknown question . There is even a name for it, hallucinations. Be on guard if querying for something for which information online is scarce.
A substantial portion of our lives are based on language. We speak, listen, read and write words. Language is a big part of what defines us and provides us the ability to communicate with others. Learning a language means mastering a complex system of words, structure and grammar. A model which has mastered language can do magical things like write stories, come up with poetry, translate, summarize and generate text, help you with your research, suggest and fix code in case you are a programmer, assist with your travel and lot of exciting other things. In short, it is a better assisting technology than any before, and no wonder it caught people’s imagination in a big way.
You have now been introduced to ChatGPT. In next articles we shall cover features of ChatGPT in detail.
Next article: ChatGPT Features — How to use ChatGPT effectively
Article series: ChatGPT Features
