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How is OpenAI's ChatGPT being used?

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Depending on your circle (online especially), you may be sick of hearing about the new language model trained for dialogue. It's been taking over online discussions in a space that has already been buzzing about AI for the better part of 2022. Let's take a few minutes to review what ChatGPT is, how the industry is rapidly imporving and expanding, and how ChatGPT (and other AI applications) will have an impact on the future of not only technology, but society and the world itself.

What is ChatGPT?

Launched to the public in November of 2022, ChatGPT is a artifical intelligence driven "chatbot" that specializes in human dialogue. It is an iteration on OpenAI's GPT3.5, an autoregressive language model that uses deep-learning to produce human-like text1. ChatGPT was fine-tuned using supervised learning and reinforcement learning, two common paradigms used in machine learning. ChatGPT is a stateful system, so it can remember all prompts in a given "conversation". This feature elevates ChatGPT and bridges much of the empathy gaps that exist in other chatbots. The feeling of communicating with a machine is something that takes some getting used to, but will likely also be a bit uncanny forever; or at least I hope it remains to feel mildly unnatural, since it very much is at this point in history.

Some OpenAI Employees

OpenAI Employees - From WIRED

How Can ChatGPT Be Used?

Spending anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours with the application is really the best way to get familiar with the kind of quality standard present. The sky is the limit when it comes to receiving feedback, facts, thoughts, best-practices, and much, much more. ChatGPT can assist pretty much any type of person and it can almost be used as a subsititue for Google Search in this regard. Maybe you want to find out "how many cups are in a gallon" or "how tall is the Eiffel Tower". GhatGPT should have no issue relaying facts and statistics. Sports fans can easily discover data on players or matches, athletes could ask about effective stretches or training routines, programmers can ask for an assist on how to perform a certain task or operation in a given programming language, writers could seek reference materials for a given setting or period, and so on. Like I mentioned earlier: the sky is the limit, and these sorts of AI models are only going to become more capable and sophisticated.

Disclaimer

Do keep in mind that ChatGPT is not by any means guarenteed to always respond with 100% correct statements. As the launch page states, ChatGPT may "occasionaly generate incorrect information" and "occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content". Finally, it may have a "limited knowledge of world and events after 2021", due to the majority of its training being done with data that is now up to a couple years in the past.

Asking ChatGPT to Describe Itself

ChatGPT Describing Iteself

Some Cool Examples

Writing Python scripts for Blender

Using ChatGPT to reanimate and imitate public figures

Using ChatGPT and Midjourney to make characters, a setting, and a plot for a movie

Writing a Seinfeld scene

Try ChatGPT for Yourself

ChatGPT is available to the public on OpenAI's website, found here. You will have to create a free OpenAI account, if you have not already done so. That can be done on their site as well. Theoretically, the more people that test ChatGPT, the more data the team at OpenAI has, and the better they can make any future iterations and technologies. There is most certaily an unprecidented quantity of ML-driven AI applications coming in the near and distant future. It's an exciting (or scary) time to be alive!

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia - GPT3 ↩

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