The AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, a software programmed to simulate human conversation – was made available to the public on November 30 via OpenAI’s website, and while it is still in the research review phase, users can sign up and test it out free of charge.
ChatGPT uses the GPT-3.5 language technology – a large artificial intelligence model made by OpenAI that has been trained on a massive amount of text data from a variety of sources.
The bot boasts a dialogue format that allows users to provide both simple and complex instructions that ChatGPT is trained to follow and provide a detailed response to – the company promises it can even answer follow-up questions and admit when it made a mistake.
Most notably, ChatGPT has been able to generate intricate Python code and write college-level essays when given a prompt – boosting concerns that such technology can replace human workers like journalists or programmers in the future.
The program has its limitations, including a knowledge base that ends in 2021, a tendency to produce incorrect answers, constantly using the same phrases and when given one version of a question, the bot claims it cannot answer it, but when given a slightly tweaked version, it answers it just fine.
Many large figures in the tech world have expressed their astonishment with ChatGPT, like Box CEO Aaron Levie, who tweeted about the software giving a glimpse into the future of technology and how “everything is going to be different going forward.”
According to CEO Sam Altman, the software reached the one million users mark on Monday, less than a week after its launch.
On Sunday, Elon Musk tweeted that he found out OpenAI was accessing Twitter’s database to train ChatGPT, so he put an immediate pause on it because OpenAI is no longer non-profit and open-sourced anymore, it should pay for this information in the future.
Although ChatGPT is free to use, in a Twitter reply to Musk on Monday, Altman stated that cost per chat was “probably single-digits cents,” leading to a discourse about the future of monetizing the platform.
