ChatGPT: How AI is Transforming Language

 

The Power of ChatGPT

In the world of artificial intelligence, there's been one name that's been on everyone's lips lately - ChatGPT. OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT, opened the tool up for public testing in November 2022. In under a week, the AI model amassed over a million users, according to OpenAI's CEO. By the end of January, ChatGPT was averaging about 13 million visitors per day.

Users have put the text-based AI chatbot through its paces with prompts ranging from the silly, to the practical and even the creative. The future is unfolding. It's hard to ignore. Automation is coming, just knocking on the door.

The tool has become so popular that it's not unusual for users to be met with a message saying that ChatGPT is at capacity and can't handle any more queries.

Impressive Writing Abilities

As a linguist and as a person who cares a lot about grammatical issues, stylistic issues, punctuation, spelling, the first thing that's impressive is how good it is at basic writing. It's better than most of the writing that I've gotten from students over the decades.

I would say it has been an explosion of interest around not just ChatGPT but around generative AI more broadly. I've described this in a couple different scenarios as being akin to an iPhone moment.

Concerns and Limitations

Of course, as with any new technology, there are several legitimate concerns. If people believe that there's a problem with fake news, tools like this can only make the problem worse. OpenAI declined to be interviewed as part of this documentary. So, in order to figure out what ChatGPT is and how it works, CNBC decided to go to the second best source and just ask the chatbot itself.

We entered our questions into the bot's web interface and instructed ChatGPT to answer in a one to two sentence interview format. We used the text to speech software to give ChatGPT a voice.

Can you give me a short description of yourself and then tell me what kinds of things can you do? I am ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am capable of understanding and generating text and can answer a wide range of questions as well as generate creative writing and text summaries.

So, a lot of the people that have used your services seem to think that you're smart. Tell me, how do you have all this knowledge? I have been trained on a massive data set of text which allows me to understand and generate text on a wide range of topics. The data set contains a wide variety of information, such as books, articles, and websites, which allows me to have knowledge on many different subjects.

Do you have any limitations or are you sometimes wrong? As a language model, I don't have my own personal experiences or beliefs. I can only base my responses on the information that I've been trained on, which means that my answers may be limited in their accuracy or completeness. Additionally, my knowledge is based on the data that was available to me at the time of my training, so it may not be up to date. And as an AI model, I might make mistakes based on the model's predictions.

The Power of Generative AI

The maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI, has some big backers, including Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Khosla Ventures. Elon Musk also helped to cofound the company back in 2015. ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is just one of the company's projects, all of which support its goal of ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

At the core of ChatGPT and other chatbots like it, is what experts refer to as a language model. For ChatGPT, that model is called GPT 3.5. Language model is the underlying technology that powers the chatbot. I like to think about it as the language model being the engine and the chatbot being the car. And so, the language model itself is a sort of an it's a complex, what they call, machine learning software. It's the thing that sifts through the data and finds patterns and the chat interfaces which when people interact with, that's where they receive the answers from.

The Potential and Challenges of Generative AI

Generative AI is a rapidly growing field, enabling the creation of brand-new content in various forms such as text, video, and audio. Venture capitalists are investing heavily in generative AI companies, with funding reaching $1.37 billion in 2022 alone. Microsoft has been a major investor in OpenAI, committing $1 billion to the startup and announcing a third round of investment in January.

However, there are still challenges to overcome. The cost of training and operating generative AI models is high, and there are concerns about biases and toxicity in the data used to train these models. Companies like OpenAI are working to address these issues and add guardrails to ensure responsible usage of generative AI.

The Impact and Future of ChatGPT

ChatGPT has already made a significant impact, with its potential to transform industries such as journalism, law, translation, and programming. However, experts believe that it is not a replacement for human intelligence, but rather a tool to assist and automate certain tasks. Responsible usage and ongoing development are crucial to ensure that the impact of AI is positive.

While there are concerns and challenges to address, the rise of ChatGPT showcases the power of AI in language processing and opens new possibilities for human-machine interaction.

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