Quick answer: Developed by independent research lab OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that can provide rapid responses to your questions, inquiries, and general conversation like a human. With it, ChatGPT can also execute commands that you deliver to it via simple text.
Besides holding true to its name, ChatGPT can also perform a variety of other tasks that you expect from a virtual assistant. This adds to the platform’s functionality, while also highlighting the many capabilities of AI.
But exactly what is ChatGPT and how does it work? To help you find these answers, here is a lowdown on the chatbot and its many functionalities.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is able to pull off his feats through the power of AI’s subset called deep learning, which lets it process a vast collection of pre-saved information to perform its functions. The system was trained on a dataset that comprised billions of words through multiple resources such as literature and the internet.
ChatGPT uses a training approach and dataset similar to Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT), which is a language model developed by OpenAI to generate human-like text. This is also where the platform gets its name, which is a portmanteau of “chat” and “GPT.”
But despite using AI to learn natural language, maintain its chats, and carry out instructions, ChatGPT maintains a simple front-end interface that operates entirely through conversation-based text. It is not more difficult than texting a friend over messages or Discord.
This means that you don’t have to learn coding, know complex mechanisms, or give the bot any specific commands to get the answer you want or receive the result of a task that you need. Instead, you can simply drop a line to ChatGPT in order to outline what you want, and it will be able to help you out in most cases.
This explains ChatGPT meaning in simpler terms, while also helping you understand how powerful the tool can be. From there, it becomes easier for you to grasp exactly how you can use ChatGPT for different purposes.
What Can ChatGPT Do?
ChatGPT can perform a variety of actions through simple text commands. These include but are not limited to:
- Chatting in a human-like manner.
- Performing simple research tasks.
- Answering questions about topics such as history, literature, and science.
- Providing suggestions based on available data.
- Correcting mistakes in presented equations and code.
- Carrying out translations between different languages.
- Sharing resources such as recipes, books, and movies about a particular topic.
- Generating text such as fictional stories, book summaries, and quick analyses.
When learning what is ChatGPT, this list of example functionalities allows you to see it as the highly powerful tool that it is and determine how it can perform the tasks of a search engine, content generator, basic researcher, and personal assistant all through a single system.
With that being said, ChatGPT proves its immense capability at handling certain tasks such as providing summaries for books, but it falters a little at other commands such as offering perfect translations between languages.
Nonetheless, the versatility that ChatGPT brings to the table makes it quite a compelling tool that not only outlines the efficacy of AI, but also provides you with incredible ease for performing your day to day tasks. Whether you are trying to find recipes or planning a family movie night, ChatGPT can be the well-informed companion that you need through every step.
Since ChatGPT can accomplish all of these tasks with simple text commands, you can also simply ask the chatbot what it can do, and get an answer about a few capabilities that can be of help to you. Otherwise, you can request it to execute tasks like you would ask a friend, and there are high chances that it would be able to follow through on the provided instructions.
This takes ChatGPT meaning to another level and makes it easy for you to access AI-based functionalities through simple, text-based prompts that anyone can use. Besides allowing you to explore the many functionalities of AI, it also remains a delight to utilize as an everyday tool.
How Does ChatGPT Work?
ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI research lab, as a natural language model. While leveraging the power of machine learning, OpenAI trained ChatGPT with supervised learning that labels different sets of data to help the machine or system identify information with ease.
ChatGPT also uses deep learning, which is a subset of machine learning. Deep learning allows an AI system to take information from vast groups of data through artificial neural networks (NNs) or deep neural networks (DNNs). These networks are what is ChatGPT derives the power from to find similarities or connections between available information through layers of data.
Deep learning also lets ChatGPT work as a natural language processing (NLP) model, which in turn allows the program to understand casual language and create text that looks like it was written by a human. This holds true for regular conversations as well as special requests such as generating short stories.
More technically, ChatGPT is built as an architecture known as a transformer. This structure lets ChatGPT determine what are the most important parts of the input or text instructions, and build its response according to them. This helps ChatGPT achieve the seemingly impossible feat of accessing its AI functionalities with simple text instructions.
Is ChatGPT Free?
ChatGPT was launched as a free-to-use tool by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. But this free of charge access is only available for a limited time: OpenAI is offering this perk as a research preview to determine ChatGPT’s overall efficacy during its mass usage. Once the lab has determined that ChatGPT meaning and functionalities are capable enough for it to be justified as a paid tool, it is more than likely to start charging for the solution.
It is because OpenAI is also the driving force behind the wildly successful AI systems known as Dall-E 2 and GPT-3, which are known for generating AI-based artwork and text content, respectively. Both of these tools are currently available against different subscription plans, which is how ChatGPT is supposed to end up.
But for now, ChatGPT remains free to use. You just have to sign-up using your email address to utilize the tool every single day, for as many times as you like. While it is not a requirement, OpenAI requests that you help improve ChatGPT by telling it whether its generated response was good or bad (which you can do by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down reaction buttons on every response).
Does ChatGPT Have Any Limitations?
After understanding what is ChatGPT, it is important to have a firm grasp over the limitations that the tool has. This ensures that you can use ChatGPT without any negative surprises along the way.
Its Knowledge is Limited
ChatGPT was trained on a variety of resources such as literature, research materials, and the internet, but its training content is only up to date until 2021. This makes its knowledge limited for current events such as politics, movies, music, and pop culture. This changes ChatGPT meaning from an all-encompassing search engine to a tool with distinct limitations.
For instance, if you have to write a blurb for a topic such as space exploration, ChatGPT would not include the latest research that could influence the subject matter. Keeping this in mind, it is crucial that you determine your questions and assess the platform’s responses according to this limitation in mind. With that being said, the program remains highly capable of generating responses for the data that it has been trained on.
It Does Not Access the Internet
Even though ChatGPT is trained with preset data that includes books, journals, articles, and a large part of the internet, it is unable to access the internet in real time. It is to prevent the model from learning offensive information that it could include in its responses, while also managing its training through a more streamlined approach.
This means that if you want to request specific links to website pages other than their domains, ChatGPT may not be able to provide them to you if they were generated after its training period. For instance, while it can provide you with the Wikipedia page link for American cuisine, it cannot share individual links for the latest songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It Can Sometimes Be Offensive
ChatGPT has been built to prevent being offensive in its operations, which is a major reason why it is not allowed to access the internet. But sometimes, the system can falter and generate content that can be harmful or NSFW. This can make the tool’s responses seem insensitive to the point of being offensive.
By learning what is ChatGPT trained on and how controlled it is in terms of its access to the world outside its training data, you may not expect this to happen. But it is still possible for the language model to put together offensive responses or sexually explicit material that is far from what you want it to generate. Once you are aware of this possibility, you can steer clear of feeling shocked by such instances.
Its Translation is Not Always Accurate
Despite being a language model that is built to understand natural language and respond with it, ChatGPT is not a highly accurate tool to perform translations. Sometimes, it can miss out key grammar rules between translations. At other instances, it can use incorrect words or synonyms that change the whole meaning of the original text.
If you do not speak the source and translation languages, it is best that you rely on another tool for now to get more accurate translations. While AI-powered translators such as Google Translate still slip up here and there, they have comparatively more accurate results when put side by side against ChatGPT.
How Can You Access ChatGPT?
You can access ChatGPT through the OpenAI website. If you don’t have an OpenAI account, you can create one for free and move forward with using the tool right away. Since ChatGPT is available as a web-based application, you don’t need to install any special software for it. You can access it through your regular web browser and enjoy seeing how AI can achieve amazing feats with a simple chat interface.
