ChatGPT: Everything you need to know

For years, there has been worldwide fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impending takeover of the world… who knew that it would start with the world of art and literature.

After months of dominating the internet with its AI image generator Dall-E 2, OpenAI is back in everyone’s social media feeds thanks to ChatGPT - a chatbot made using the company’s technology GPT. It’s not exactly the catchiest name and could easily be the title of a random computer component or vague legal reference, but GPT-3 is actually the internet’s best-known language processing AI model. So what is GPT-3 and how is it used to make ChatGPT? What is it able to do, and what in the world is a language processing AI model? Everything you need to know about OpenAI’s latest viral baby can be found below.

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text and has a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots. It is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Its most common use so far is creating ChatGPT - a highly capable chatbot. To give you a little taste of its most basic ability, we asked GPT-3’s chatbot to write its own description as you can see above. It’s a little bit boastful, but completely accurate and arguably very well written.

In less corporate terms, GPT-3 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

Above, it described itself as a language processing AI model. This simply means it is a program able to understand human language as it is spoken and written, allowing to understand the worded information it is fed, and what to spit back out.

With its 175 billion parameters, its hard to narrow down what GPT-3 does. The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can’t produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.

This gives it a pretty wide range of abilities, everything from writing poems about sentient farts and cliché rom-coms in alternate universes, through to explaining quantum mechanics in simple terms or writing full-length research papers and articles. While it can be fun to use OpenAI’s years of research to get an AI to write bad stand-up comedy scripts or answer questions about your favourite celebrities, its power lies in its speed and understanding of complicated matters.

Where we could spend hours researching, understanding and writing an article on quantum mechanics, ChatGPT can produce a well-written alternative in seconds.

Science Focus