What is ChatGPT?

You can’t talk about ChatGPT without talking about GPT, or Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, which is a type of Large Language Model (LLM).  GPT refers to a family of machine learning models developed by OpenAI. GPT models, like GPT-4, are based on the transformer architecture, which is a deep learning model primarily used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

GPT models are “generative” because they are designed to create human-like responses by predicting the most likely next word or sequence of words in a sentence without losing context. GPT models are pre-trained on large amounts of publicly available text from the internet, allowing them to learn the statistical patterns, grammar, and contextual relationships between words. This pre-training helps the models to acquire a broad understanding of language and context.

GPT models (and Large Language Models) use a Transformer architecture, which is a method in artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data like the human brain (also known as “neural networks”).  Transformer models excel at handling sequential data, such as text, and employ self-attention mechanisms to capture relationships between words and encode them into contextualized representations.

Once pre-training is complete, GPT models can be fine-tuned on specific tasks, such as text completion, translation, summarization, or question-answering, by providing them with task-specific training data. The models use a technique called “unsupervised learning” during pre-training and then transition to “supervised learning” during fine-tuning.

GPT models have achieved significant advancements in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, demonstrating their ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text. They can be used for a wide range of applications, including chatbots, content generation, language translation, virtual assistants, and more.

Overall, GPT models are highly flexible and powerful language models that have gained significant attention due to their ability to understand and generate human-like text in a wide range of contexts.

So, what is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that was developed by OpenAI.  The ChatGPT chatbot is accessible from a website, where you can engage and converse (via typing) with an AI model and get instant responses to your questions.  Where Google search will give you results to questions by connecting you with relevant websites, ChatGPT will give you the answers to your questions.  ChatGPT will also allow you to follow-up on your questions with additional questions, keeping your entire history of questions and responses relevant to the subsequent questions.

ChatGPT launched in December 2022, with GPT-3.5, which was trained on 175 billion parameters, whereas ChatGPT-4 is estimated to be trained on 1 trillion parameters.

OpenAI is an American company, founded in 2015, as a non-profit, open-source company, by a large group of Artificial Intelligence scientists and investors.  OpenAI has transitioned from a not-for-profit company to a for-profit company and has a partnership with Microsoft, as its primary investor, investing over $1 billion with an additional $10 billion committed to OpenAI for further research and development.

How should questions be asked to ChatGPT?