What is ChatGPT and how do I use it?

Since its announcement in December 2022, ChatGPT has become well-known on the internet. With 1.8 billion monthly visitors, we continue to reach new heights with each passing month. So what exactly is this ChatGPT phenomenon? To find all the answers, we have put together a detailed explanation of what ChatGPT is, its developers, its features, and more.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that utilizes AI (artificial intelligence) and was developed by a company called OpenAI. This is essentially a website where you can chat with AI models. These AI models are also called LLM (Large Language Model) . As the name suggests, “chat” refers to the conversational feature, and GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is a type of LLM. We will discuss GPT in more detail later.

Currently, ChatGPT allows you to chat with two AI models: GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 . Both of these LLM models were developed internally by OpenAI and are not open source. GPT-3.5 is free and available to everyone, while GPT-4 is available only to paid users (those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus). Both models are highly conversational and contextually understanding, but GPT-4 is currently the most advanced and capable LLM in the world.

A quick explanation about the model: GPT-3.5 is trained with 175 billion parameters, while GPT-4 is said to be trained with a whopping 1 trillion parameters , which is an incredible amount. has the ability. Google’s PaLM 2 AI, on the other hand, is trained with about 540 billion parameters, making it one of the largest LLMs, but still smaller than GPT-4. Additionally, GPT-3.5 has a maximum context length of 4096 tokens, while GPT-4 allows up to 32,768 tokens. Context length is essentially the amount of information that a model can process and produce.

What does GPT mean? Explained

As mentioned above, GPT is a type of large-scale language model (LLM) that has opened the floodgates for generative artificial intelligence. It is based on a transformer architecture that is trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate human-like text content. It may come as a surprise, but Google has made significant contributions to the GPT architecture.

Back in 2017, researchers working at Google published a seminal research paper, “ Attending is All You Need ,” which introduced the Transformer model (the “T” in GPT).

“Attention” is introduced to large-scale language models to help predict the next word in a sentence without losing context. The attention mechanism allows the model to focus on different elements of the input and produce each element of the output sequence. Here, the next word is not predicted based on natural language understanding like a human would, but rather based on patterns and statistical inference and the data on which the LLM was trained.

In summary, Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) is the underlying architecture on which all popular Transformer models are built, including ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. We continue to advance the field of natural language processing and push the boundaries of AI.

Who developed ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was developed by an American company called OpenAI . The company was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, open-source company by a group of AI scientists and investors, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Satskeva, Andrei Karpathy, and others. In December 2022, OpenAI launched a free preview of ChatGPT, which is based on the GPT-3.5 model.

OpenAI has now transitioned from a nonprofit to a “capped” for-profit company and partnered with Microsoft in a $1 billion investment package. In January 2023, Microsoft announced that it would invest $10 billion in OpenAI for further research and development.

Great features of ChatGPT

First and foremost, ChatGPT is very creative (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models). They are good at natural language processing and don’t lose context easily. A variety of creative tasks are possible, from writing poems and stories to coming up with absurd ideas and explanations, to complex ideas. However, GPT-3.5 is also prone to hallucinations . People regularly make up information that doesn’t exist or quote data from nowhere.

In this respect, GPT-4 is much better than GPT-3.5 . In real-world evaluation tests, GPT-4 scored 40% higher than GPT-3.5 across various categories. Therefore, if you want to use ChatGPT for research purposes, we highly recommend subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which gives you access to the GPT-4 model for $20 per month.

Apart from that, GPT-4 has excellent performance in many academic and professional exams including SAT, GRE, Uniform Bar Exam, USMLE, Leetcode, etc. They also excel at coding, reasoning, understanding, and solving complex mathematical problems.

Additionally, with Bing integration , GPT-4 now has access to the Internet for up-to-date information on any subject. Find key results on the web using Microsoft’s Bing search engine. This is not possible with the free GPT-3.5 model whose knowledge expires in September 2021.

You can then extend the functionality of your AI chatbot using the ChatGPT plugin. This allows third-party services to connect directly to ChatGPT . From booking airline tickets to summarizing YouTube videos with ChatGPT, you can do just about anything with the plugin. Follow the linked tutorial to learn how to enable and use the ChatGPT plugin.

Next, there is a code interpreter plugin that allows you to run Python code directly in ChatGPT. How cool is it to have your own shell inside ChatGPT? But be aware that the code interpreter plugin is not yet available to all users. Finally, GPT-4 is also a multimodal model , meaning it can analyze both text and images. This feature hasn’t been added to ChatGPT yet, but it will change the way you interact with AI models.

In the future, you’ll be able to ask ChatGPT to pull final impressions from a medical report or get nutritional information from an image. The next generation GPT-5 model will be even more powerful and feature-rich.

What can you do with ChatGPT?

ChatGPT has endless possibilities. Write stories and poems, generate music code , debug and write code, easily explain abstract concepts, solve math and reasoning problems, and much more . There’s a long list of great things you can do with ChatGPT. More and more people are using ChatGPT for writing essays and planning trips.

Apart from that, ChatGPT allows you to earn money by creating apps and websites, affiliate marketing, writing e-books, starting an online business, and more. You can also build custom AI chatbots based on your own data.

If you’re a programmer, you can use ChatGPT to write code in VS Code or your favorite IDE. I’m also good at finding and fixing errors in code . I’ve been using ChatGPT for a variety of tasks over the past few months, and I’ve always been impressed.

How to use ChatGPT in 2024

To use ChatGPT, visit the chat.openai.com website and create a free OpenAI account. After signing in, you can chat with unlimited free GPT-3.5 models.

However, if you want to use ChatGPT for serious work, we highly recommend subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which gives you access to the powerful GPT-4 model.

If you don’t want to pay $20 per month, you can use ChatGPT 4 for free with Bing Chat and other third-party services. Bing AI Chat (“Creative Mode”) is powered by ChatGPT 4 and also provides a longer context window. You can also use Bing AI Chat in your favorite web browser.

Top ChatGPT Alternatives

If you want to check out alternatives to ChatGPT, you can start with Google Bard. Like ChatGPT, Bard AI is Google’s large-scale language model built on the latest PaLM 2 AI model . Although not as capable as GPT-4, it is comparable to Bard for many other tasks. Additionally, check out Bing AI Chat, built on GPT-4 and delivering 300 chats per day (30 per session).

Next, check out Anthropic’s Claude AI, which is considered a rival to ChatGPT . We also introduced a 100K token context window, which was not previously seen in ChatGPT or any other LLM. To find more free ChatGPT alternatives like this, visit the linked article.