It started as just a research project. But ChatGPT instead swept us away with its mind-blowing skills. Now you can even get custom AI apps.
Back in 2022, OpenAI wowed the world when it introduced ChatGPT and showed a chatbot with an entirely new level of power, breadth and usefulness.
ChatGPT and the generative AI technology behind it aren’t a surprise anymore, but keeping track of what it can do can be a challenge as new abilities arrive. Most notably, OpenAI now lets anyone write custom AI apps called GPTs and share them on its own app store. While OpenAI is leading the generative AI charge, it’s hotly pursued by Microsoft, Google and startups far and wide.
Generative AI still hasn’t shaken a core problem, that it makes up information that sounds plausible but isn’t necessarily correct. But there’s no denying AI has fired the imaginations of computer scientists, loosened the purse strings of venture capitalists and caught the attention of everyone from teachers to doctors to artists and more, all wondering how AI will change their work and their lives.
If you’re trying to get a handle on ChatGPT, this FAQ is for you. Here’s a look at what’s up.What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an online chatbot that responds to “prompts” — text requests that you type. ChatGPT has countless uses, You can request relationship advice, a summarized history of punk rock or an explanation of the ocean’s tides. It’s particularly good at writing software, and it can also handle some other technical tasks, like creating 3D models.
ChatGPT is called a generative AI because it generates these responses on its own. But it can also display more overtly creative output like screenplays, poetry, jokes and student essays. That’s one of the abilities that really caught people’s attention.
Much of AI has been focused on specific tasks, but ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool. This puts it more into a category like a search engine.
That breadth makes it powerful but also hard to fully control. OpenAI has many mechanisms in place to try to screen out abuse and other problems, but there’s an active cat-and-mouse game afoot by researchers and others who try to get ChatGPT to do things like offer bomb-making recipes.
ChatGPT really blew people’s minds when it began passing tests. For example, AnsibleHealth researchers reported in 2023 that “ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold” for the United States Medical Licensing Exam, suggesting that AI chatbots “may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making.”
We’re a long way from fully fledged doctor-bots you can trust, but the computing industry is investing billions of dollars to solve the problems and expand AI into new domains like visual data too. OpenAI is among those at the vanguard. So strap in, because the AI journey is going to be a sometimes terrifying, sometimes exciting thrill.What’s ChatGPT’s origin?
Artificial intelligence algorithms had been ticking away for years before ChatGPT arrived. These systems were a big departure from traditional programming, which follows a rigid if-this-then-that approach. AI, in contrast, is trained to spot patterns in complex real-world data. AI has been busy for more than a decade screening out spam, identifying our friends in photos, recommending videos and translating our Alexa voice commands into computerese.
A Google technology called transformers helped propel AI to a new level, leading to a type of AI called a large language model (LLM). These AIs are trained on enormous quantities of text, including material like books, blog posts, forum comments and news articles. The training process internalizes the relationships between words, letting chatbots process input text and then generate what it believes to be appropriate output text.
A second phase of building an LLM is called reinforcement learning through human feedback, or RLHF. That’s when people review the chatbot’s responses and steer it toward good answers or away from bad ones. That significantly alters the tool’s behavior and is one important mechanism for trying to stop abuse.
OpenAI’s LLM is called GPT, which stands for “generative pretrained transformer.” Training a new model is expensive and time consuming, typically taking weeks and requiring a data center packed with thousands of expensive AI acceleration processors. OpenAI’s latest LLM is called GPT-4 Turbo. Other LLMs include Google’s Gemini (formerly called Bard), Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama.
ChatGPT is an interface that lets you easily prompt GPT for responses. When it arrived as a free tool in November 2022, its use exploded far beyond what OpenAI expected.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the company didn’t even see it as a product. It was supposed to be a mere “research preview,” a test that could draw some feedback from a broader audience, said ChatGPT product leader Nick Turley. Instead, it went viral, and OpenAI scrambled to just keep the service up and running under the demand.
“It was surreal,” Turley said. “There was something about that release that just struck a nerve with folks in a way that we certainly did not expect. I remember distinctly coming back the day after we launched and looking at dashboards and thinking, something’s broken, this couldn’t be real, because we really didn’t make a very big deal out of this launch.”
ChatGPT, a name only engineers could love, was launched as a research project in November 2022 but quickly caught on as a consumer product.How do I use ChatGPT?
The ChatGPT website is the most obvious method. Open it up, select the LLM version you want from the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, and type in a query.
OpenAI in 2023 released a ChatGPT app for iPhones and for Android phones. In February, ChatGPT for Apple Vision Pro arrived, too, adding the chatbot’s abilities to the “spatial computing” headset. Be careful to look for the genuine article, because other developers can create their own chatbot apps that link to OpenAI’s GPT.
In January, OpenAI opened its GPT Store, a collection of custom AI apps that focus ChatGPT’s all-purpose design to specific jobs. A lot more on that later, but in addition to finding them through the store you can invoke them with the @ symbol in a prompt, the way you might tag a friend on Instagram.
Microsoft uses GPT for its Bing search engine, which means you can also try out ChatGPT there.
ChatGPT is sprouting up in various hardware devices, including Volkswagen EVs, Humane’s voice-controlled lapel pin and the squarish Rabbit R1 device.How much does ChatGPT cost?
It’s free, though you have to set up an account to use it.
For more capability, there’s also a subscription called ChatGPT Plus that costs $20 per month that offers a variety of advantages: it responds faster, particularly during busy times when the free version is slow or sometimes tells you to try again later. It also offers access to newer AI models, including GPT-4. The free ChatGPT uses the older GPT-3.5, which doesn’t do as well on OpenAI’s benchmark tests but which is faster to respond. The newest variation, GPT-4 Turbo, arrived in late 2023 with more up-to-date responses and an ability to ingest and output larger blocks of text.
