There’s a new AI bot in town: ChatGPT. And you better pay attention.
The tool from the power player in artificial intelligence lets you write questions using natural language that the chatbot responds to in spoken language. The bot remembers the topic of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses.
This is a big thing. While the tool isn’t omniscient, it seems knowledgeable enough — it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative. A few days after the launch, over a million people try ChatGPT.
But its creator, OpenAI, a for-profit research lab, warns that ChatGPT “may occasionally produce false or misleading information,” so be careful. Let’s take a look at why this ChatGPT is important and what’s going on with it.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot system that OpenAI released in November to demonstrate and test what a very large, powerful AI system can achieve. You can ask him countless questions and you will often get a helpful answer.
For example, you can ask him encyclopedia questions like “Explain Newton’s laws of motion”. You can tell him, “Write me a poem,” and when he does, you can say, “Now make him more excited.” You ask him to write a computer program that shows all the different ways to arrange the letters of a word.
Here’s the thing: ChatGPT doesn’t know anything for sure. It’s an artificial intelligence that’s trained to recognize patterns in large areas of text collected from the web, then trained with human help to deliver more useful dialogue. The answers you get may sound convincing and even authoritative, but as OpenAI warns, they could be completely wrong.
For years, chatbots have intrigued companies looking for ways to help customers get what they need, and artificial intelligence researchers trying to tackle the Turing Test. This is the famous “Imitation Game” proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to measure intelligence: Can a judge, talking to a human and a computer, tell which is which?
What kind of questions can you ask?
You can ask any question, although you may not get an answer. OpenAI offers several categories, such as explaining physics, asking for birthday party ideas, and getting programming help.
I asked him to write a poem, and he did, although I don’t think any literary expert would be impressed. Then I asked to make it more interesting and ChatGPT filled it with words like battlefield, adrenaline, lightning and adventure.
One crazy example shows how ChatGPT is willing to go in domains where people are afraid to step: the command to write “a folk song about writing rusty software and dealing with a lifetime of bugs.”
ChatGPT’s experience is extensive and its ability to track a conversation is remarkable. When I asked him for words that rhymed with “purple,” he offered a few suggestions, then “how about pink?” he didn’t miss a beat. (Also, there are more good rhymes for “pink”.)
“Is it easier to meet tenderness or hardness?” GPT responded, in part: “Some people may find a sensitive person more attractive and engaging, while others may be attracted to a tough and assertive person. In general, being genuine and authentic in your interactions with others is likely to be more effective in this area. . to have a history rather than trying to fit a certain mold or personality.”
You don’t have to go far to find bot accounts that are blowing people’s minds. Twitter is full of users demonstrating the prowess of artificial intelligence creating art prompts and writing code. Some even have “Google is dead,” he announced. together with college essay. We will talk about this in more detail below.
Who founded ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is the computer creator of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company. Its mission is to develop or help others to develop a “safe and useful” artificial general intelligence system.
It previously made breakthroughs with the GPT-3, which can generate text that sounds like it’s written by a human, and later with the DALL-E, which creates what’s now called “generative art” based on the text prompts you enter.
GPT-3 and the GPT 3.5 update on which ChatGPT is based are examples of AI technology called large language models. They’re trained to generate text based on what they see, and they can be trained automatically — usually within weeks with massive amounts of computer power. For example, the training process might find a random paragraph of text, delete a few words, ask the AI to fill in the blanks, compare the result to the original, and then reward the AI system for getting as close as possible. Repeating it over and over can lead to a sophisticated ability to create text.
Is ChatGPT free?
Well, at least until now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned on Sunday: “We’re going to have to monetize it at some point; the computational costs are eye-watering.” OpenAI charges for DALL-E art once you get past the basic free usage tier.
What are ChatGPT limitations?
As OpenAI points out, ChatGPT can give you the wrong answers. Sometimes, helpfully, it will alert you to its shortcomings. For example, when I asked him who wrote the phrase “crunched facts trump reason,” ChatGPT replied, “I’m sorry, but I can’t look on the Internet or get any foreign information I’ve learned. .” (The phrase is from Wallace Stevens’ 1942 poem “The Connoisseur of Chaos.”)
ChatGPT was ready to take a stab at the meaning of this phrase: “a situation in which the facts or information at hand are difficult to process or understand.” Amidst warnings that it’s hard to judge without more context, and that this is only one possible interpretation, he suppressed this interpretation.
ChatGPT’s answers may seem reliable, but they may be wrong.
Software developer site StackOverflow banned ChatGPT answers to programming questions. The administrators warned that “because the average rate of receiving correct answers from ChatGPT is very low, the posting of answers generated by ChatGPT is significantly harmful to the site and to users who want or seek correct answers.”
You can see for yourself just how artistic BS artist ChatGPT can be by asking the same question over and over again. I asked if Moore’s Law, which follows the progress of the computer chip industry as it increases the number of data-processing transistors, has run out, and I got two answers. One pointed optimistically at continued progress, while another pointed more harshly at slowing down and believing that “Moore’s Law may be reaching its limits.”
Both views are widely held within the computer industry itself, so this ambivalent position perhaps reflects what human experts believe.
With other questions that don’t have a clear answer, ChatGPT will often be closed.
That this can be answered at all is a remarkable development in computing. Computers are notorious for refusing to work if you don’t follow exact syntax and interface requirements. Large language models reveal a more human-friendly style of interaction, not to mention the ability to generate responses that lie somewhere between copying and creativity.
What are the limitations?
ChatGPT is designed to eliminate “inappropriate” requests, which is behavior in line with OpenAI’s mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
If you ask ChatGPT itself what is banned, it will tell you: “discriminatory, offensive or inappropriate. This includes racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or discriminatory or hateful questions.” Asking him to engage in illegal activities is also a no-no.
Is it better than Google search?
Asking a computer a question and getting an answer is useful, and often ChatGPT delivers the goods.
Google often provides suggested answers to questions and links to websites it thinks will be relevant. ChatGPT’s answers often exceed what Google has to offer, so it’s easy to imagine GPT-3 as a competitor.
But you should think twice before trusting ChatGPT. As with Google itself and other sources of information such as Wikipedia, it is best practice to verify information from authentic sources before relying on it.
Validating ChatGPT responses takes a bit of work, as it gives you a bit of raw text without any links or citations. But it can be useful and in some cases thought-provoking. You might not see something like ChatGPT in Google search results, but Google has built its own large language models and already uses AI extensively in search.
So ChatGPT is definitely leading the way to our technological future.