What is Chat GPT

Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Open AI. Users can send in their queries inside a chat application and chat GPT replies with an answer. Chat GPT is not just another chatbot with some pre-decided responses. Instead, it answers the queries just like any human would do. The responses generated by Chat GPT are very human-like. Responses are not only intelligent but also emotional. For example, I asked chat GPT to write a poem in the style of Shakespeare and this is what it generated.

How is Chat GPT different from Google search

On the surface, one may confuse chat GPT with what Google search does, but in reality, it is very different. Search engines like Google fetch results for queries, but these results are links to some content already generated by users. Whereas the results generated by chat GPT are not a copy of some existing content. Instead, chat GPT is trained on the entire data of the internet, and then it produces results by analysing this data. Imagine how a human answers questions after reading a book by using their analytical skills, chat GPT also analyse the publicly available content and produces a response to the query. This is called Generative Artificial Intelligence.

To illustrate, I asked this query: "how to make vanilla cake" to both Google and chat GPT. see the difference in results in these screenshots.

How to use Chat GPT

Chat GPT bot can be accessed on this link. The link will open a chat application in which one can type your queries and chat GPT will reply within seconds. To be able to use it, one would need to create an account with open AI. One can log in with Google as well to create the account.

It is free to use chat GPT without any limits. Though due to its huge popularity, the chat GPT server gets overloaded and users might have to wait for a little before they can use it.

Common use cases of Chat GPT

Chat GPT is being used for a wide variety of use cases. Some of the most popular ones are listed below.

Content generation

Chat GPT is being used to generate all kinds of content like blogs, tweets, youtube video descriptions, email replies and much more. The content generated by chat GPT is of high quality and indistinguishable from what human generates.

For example, it takes about a week to write a blog on any topic. Blog writers would have to research the topic, create an outline of the blog, write the content and get it reviewed. Chat GPT has reduced this time to a few minutes. This is a major shift in how future businesses will operate. With the power of AI, they can improve their efficiency, and reduce costs for lots of their tasks.

This is an email reply generated by chat GPT.

Explain complicated topics

Chat GPT is being extensively used for educational purposes to understand complicated topics in simple terms. With its knowledge of the entire internet and human-like analytical skills, chat GPT can explain any topic in very easy terminologies, just like a good teacher would do.

I asked chat GPT to explain how a car engine works. This is what it replied.

Generating new ideas

Many people are using chat GPT to generate new business ideas, ideas for writing stories, ideas for birthday celebrations and so on. This is what chat GPT has to say about ideas for 10 year old's birthday.

Notice the tone and the quality of the reply. It feels like some human is helping with the ideas instead of a computer bot.

Writing & debugging code

Chat GPT is being extensively used to get help on coding-related queries. This is a boon for the developer community. Chat GPT is writing entire code snippets which developers can copy and run on their machines. Google can answer developer-related queries by pointing to some existing blogs or stack overflow questions. But chat GPT is itself writing code.

I asked chat GPT to write javascript code to make HTTP requests.

Limitations of Chat GPT

Though chat GPT is awesome so far, it does have some limitations.

1. It always replies with an answer even if it does not know. This results in wrong answers at times. But the confidence with which it replies makes us believe that the answer is correct. For example, chat GPT at times produces code which does not work in reality.

2. Since chat GPT is trained on datasets from the entire internet, it may produce harmful content or biased answers.

3. Chat GPT is trained on data upto 2021 so it has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021

API for Chat GPT

Unfortunately as of now, there is no API available to directly access chat GPT. The only way is to access it from the web application from this link.

But there are workarounds. Chat GPT is based on Open AI's GPT 3 APIs. These APIs are public. There are various models which take in text input as a prompt and produce a text reply, just like chat GPT does. The most powerful of these models is "text-davinci-003". The APIs are super simple to use and the documentation is available in this link.

Conclusion

As per popular stats, chat GPT gained its first million users in just 5 days. It is widely used by people from non-technical backgrounds too. Given its adoption rate, chat GPT and Open AI will change how humans and businesses will operate in the digital world.

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