A.I. Chatbot ChatGPT has Tech Giants Clashing and the World Talking

I asked the buzzy artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, to explain what it is about and how it got the attention of schools and corporate boardrooms, as well as social media users worldwide.

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OpenAI describes ChatGPT as "an AI-powered chatbot based on the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) language model. It uses deep learning to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner."

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There has been a lot of talk about this tool in the business world lately. Many companies, including oil giants, banks - and even the industrial behemoth Caterpillar - have mentioned it on earnings calls.

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Despite the positive potential of ChatGPT, it has also raised concerns over potential abuses. In classrooms, students have used ChatGPT to generate entire essays, while hackers have begun testing it with a view to writing malicious code.

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How does ChatGPT work, exactly? Here's a simple guide to all you need to know about the widely used AI chatbot, ChatGPT.

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What is ChatGPT?

Founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015, OpenAI is a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in AI chatbots. This company is backed by well-known investors, most notably Microsoft, and is home to ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence.

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This is one of several examples of generative artificial intelligence that exist today. As a result, these tools enable users to enter written prompts and the AI will generate new texts, images, and videos that are human-like, based on the information they have entered.

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In no small part, because ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of data, it is capable of producing human-like responses.

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“We are seeing more and more human-like responses from these algorithms, so what you're seeing are things that we never imagined computers could do before,” Jeffrey Wong, global chief innovation officer at professional services firm EY, said to Trade Algo in an interview.

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A unique feature of ChatGPT is its ability to log context from earlier messages in a thread, which is used to form responses later on.

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What makes it so popular?

ChatGPT has been able to achieve a level of virality and influences that no other generative AI application has quite been able to match.

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In the past month, it has been the subject of countless memes and has been the subject of discussions among the business community at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is not surprising that Chinese tech giant Baidu has come up with its own version called Ernie Bot.

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A tweet from Altman on Dec. 5 claimed that the chatbot had signed up 1 million users in the first five days after its release. The UBS note published last week states that within two months of ChatGPT's launch, it had already amassed 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in the history of the world.

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For TikTok to reach 100 million users, it took nine months and for Instagram to reach 100 million users, it took two and a half years.

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It has been reported that the 31st of January had been the biggest day ever for ChatGPT, with the website receiving a record 28 million daily visits, according to the data from Trade Algo. In comparison to a month ago, that was an increase of 165%.

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The most impressive thing about ChatGPT is its ability to produce human-like responses thanks in no small part to the vast amount of data it is trained on, which has made it so proficient at producing human-like responses.

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EY's Jeffrey Wong, global chief innovation officer, told Trade Algo that the responses are increasingly human-like, so we're seeing things that weren't thought possible before.

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A second feature that makes ChatGPT stand out from its competitors is that it has the ability to log the context of a thread based on the earlier messages of users and use that context later on to formulate responses.

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ChatGPT's popularity is largely due to its accessibility, which is one of the reasons for its popularity. As a public service, the OpenAI website makes the service available to anyone who wants to use it, and its potential applications range from school homework to legal briefs.

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According to Wong, the timing has also played a role in the outcome of the case.

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“I think that you usually see this burst of creativity when you come out of a pandemic,” he said. 

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“The biggest example is, after the Black Plague, there was this Renaissance, this burst of creativity across the board.”

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Why are tech giants clashing over it?

A billion dollars are being bet on ChatGPT's owner, OpenAI, by Microsoft. In late January, the tech titan announced that it would invest billions of dollars in OpenAI over a multiyear period.

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Microsoft declined to disclose a specific dollar amount. A report from Trade Algo said the Redmond, Washington tech giant was in talks to invest as much as $10 billion in the company. Microsoft previously invested $1 billion into OpenAI.

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It was announced on Tuesday that Microsoft would be introducing new AI-based updates to its Bing search engine and Edge browser as part of a press conference. Bing has been integrated with some of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 language technology, which Altman confirmed had been incorporated into the search engine.

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A day after ChatGPT was announced, Google announced its own answer to the chatbot called Bard AI. The company plans to start rolling Bard out as part of Google Search in the coming weeks.

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It is believed that ChatGPT poses a threat to Google. Instead of turning to the web search pioneer for all your most pressing questions, people could rely on ChatGPT to provide the answers. 

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In fact, Google had taken a very early lead in the advanced conversational AI game through the launch of its own large language model called Lamda in 2021, which was actually the first in the field. By launching Bard, which is powered by the Lamda language model, it hopes to make up for the lost time it missed when it launched its own consumer product based on Lamda.

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Are we moving towards 'general' intelligence?

In spite of ChatGPT's many advantages, it has some limitations as well. There is a possibility that the answers provided by the chatbot will contain inaccuracies in terms of facts. As an example, it may invent fictitious historical names and books that do not exist or may fail to solve mathematical problems that should not be solved.

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Currently, ChatGPT only has knowledge of 2021 data, but this may improve over time. A much more advanced AI system is expected to emerge from ChatGPT in the future.

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For the time being, experts do not believe that generative AI is capable of producing intelligence that is human-like or considered "general."

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The concept of artificial general intelligence, or AGI for short, is often referred to as the holy grail of the artificial intelligence community. An intelligent agent is most commonly referred to as having the ability to understand and learn any intellectual challenge that a human being would be able to accomplish.

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OpenAI, as well as Google's DeepMind, are just a few of the many companies hoping to achieve this goal.

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There is already considerable excitement about OpenAI's next-generation LLM model, GPT-4, based on the possibilities that GPT-3 has to offer.

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To temper expectations, OpenAI’s Altman pushed back against the hype surrounding GPT-4, telling Trade Algo that people were “begging to be disappointed.”