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By Faiza Khalid
Verified Expert
5 years of experience
Faiza is a CIS engineer with a keen interest in software development, AI research, and technology writing.
Are you (still) wondering what ChatGPT is? We have got you covered in this article.
Developing an app with complex ChatGPT integrations to meet custom software specifications requires a deep understanding of ChatGPT architecture, chatbot technology, advanced AI model training, etc.
If you don’t have a professional team with this relevant expertise to take on the task, then submit a request for a complimentary discovery call, and one of our tech account managers who managed similar projects will contact you shortly.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced AI model designed to generate human-like text responses conversationally. GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer.
- Generative – the model can create texts.
- Pretrained – the model is trained on a large dataset to find patterns.
- Transformer – the model can learn relationships in sequential data and learn from the context.
What sets ChatGPT apart from other AI chatbots in the recent past is that it is trained on reinforcement learning from human feedback. This means that the model is optimized for performance from user feedback which is collected by asking humans to rate the model responses.
Such reinforcement learning makes ChatGPT capable of challenging incorrect assumptions, admitting mistakes, dismissing unethical requests, etc.
Who Created ChatGPT?
A US-based research and development company, OpenAI, developed ChatGPT. OpenAI is founded by a few of the biggest names in the tech industry, including Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.
The AI chatbot was launched in November 2022 and gathered more than 100 million active users in two months. It has seen massive investments from companies like Microsoft and PWC. OpenAI claims ChatGPT will make $1 billion in revenue in 2024.
How Does ChatGPT Work?
ChatGPT leverages deep learning models to generate text based on user inputs. The training process of the model includes pre-training and fine-tuning.
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ChatGPT utilizes a vast dataset of publicly available text and learns to predict the next word in a sentence. The model learns patterns and structures in the text and understands context and grammar to make accurate predictions.
The pre-training phase is unsupervised. The model has no specific targets to meet and learns from the raw training data.
Fine-tuning is done to modify and align the ChatGPT model to domain criteria. Human reviewers train the chatGPT language model on more specific data and provide guidance and user feedback to improve the model’s performance.
The fine-tuning phase consists of a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning techniques. The feedback from human AI trainers generates a reward model based on the ratings of the generated responses. The reward model guides the model’s training.
Advantages of ChatGPT
ChatGPT offers various advantages, such as follows:
1. Natural Language Understanding
ChatGPT excels in understanding and writing human-like text. The model can understand contexts, reasons, and language structures and produce coherent responses.
This makes it applicable to various use cases, such as customer support, conversational user interface, text writing, etc.
2. Textual Content Generation
ChatGPT can write creative and original content, which includes writing essays, suggesting improvements, generating ideas, etc. It can be used as a creative content generator to help augment the work quality and reduce the research time.
3. Accessibility
OpenAI offers SDKs and APIs to integrate with their language models, including ChatGPT. These are available in multiple programming languages, making them accessible to all developers.
ChatGPT can handle a large number of requests concurrently, making it suitable for integration in applications with high traffic loads.
4. Language Support
ChatGPT supports a range of languages like Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. This makes it a viable choice for language model integration in multilingual applications.
5. Source of Knowledge
ChatGPT is trained on a huge diverse dataset from the internet, including social media posts, websites, online books, etc., which makes it a wide-range knowledge base. Users can ask questions from ChatGPT on various topics and engage in discussions.
Disadvantages of ChatGPT
Despite having many potential benefits for users, ChatGPT has some limitations too. Some disadvantages of ChatGPT include the following:
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1. Lack of contextual understanding
ChatGPT lacks the ability to grasp the conversation context completely. It generally processes information text by text which could lead to incoherent responses from the model in case of complex conversations.
2. Incorrect responses
In case of ambiguous questions, ChatGPT starts giving incorrect or nonsensical answers. The model makes assumptions about the intentions of users instead of asking for clarification.
For this reason, the StackOverflow site has temporarily banned ChatGPT-generated answers to the questions, as they seem good but have a high probability of being wrong.
3. Biased responses
ChatGPT model learns from the data available on the public internet that could contain biases present in society. ChatGPT could produce these biases when generating responses. It can generate text that is sexist, racist, etc.
4. Ethical concerns
The usage of ChatGPT is also raising concerns for unethical activities and misuses, such as spreading false information, academic cheating, etc.
The alleged risk of ChatGPT misuse for academic purposes was so overwhelming in the initial period of its release that a Princeton University student came up with an app to highlight text generated by the AI bot.
As ChatGPT can write code, it also poses a challenge to cybersecurity. Cybercriminals have already started using ChatGPT for cyberattack creation, like malware, phishing attacks, financial frauds, etc.
Is ChatGPT Safe?
While ChatGPT is safe enough for you to signup and start interacting with the model without any virus on your device, ChatGPT faces the same cybersecurity risks as any other website.
A small number of ChatGPT Plus users were affected by a bug that exposed users’ first and last names, email addresses, payment addresses, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date.
OpenAI has introduced its Bug Bounty Program to encourage and challenge users and ethical hackers to report any issue they find to win rewards up to $20,000.
You might want to be careful of what you save on your ChatGPT account. According to ChatGPT, it does save your chats to review for model training.
Recently, a bug exposed these conversation histories to other users, which made the company disable the feature for a limited time.
Latest with ChatGPT
OpenAI has made available the latest gpt-4 model for users on a subscription basis. Users can update from the free version of ChatGPT to the paid version, ChatGPT Plus, for $20 a month.
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ChatGPT-4 gives priority access to new features. GPT-4 API is not available for integration into other applications. Developers can use the gpt-3.5-turbo model to integrate ChatGPT API into software apps.
In February 2023, Microsoft released its new Bing search engine with an advanced ChatGPT-based search feature. Microsoft has customized the gpt-4 model specifically for search and revamped its Edge browser. This made Bing exceed 100 million daily active users.
Microsoft has made billions of dollars of investments in OpenAI since 2019. In return, Microsft Azure is going to be OpenAI exclusive cloud computing service provider powering OpenAI workloads.
OpenAI released an iOS app for ChatGPT in May 2023. The app is available for iPhone users in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, South Korea, and a few other countries at the time of writing.
According to OpenAI CTO, the app would be available in more countries soon. Moreover, an Android app is on its way too, as of the time of writing.
Planning to Use ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has generated billions of dollars in revenue and is still booming. Businesses integrating with ChatGPT and harnessing the power of an advanced AI bot are ready for potential advantages too.
However, it is an advanced technology. You should plan your project carefully to integrate and work with ChatGPT seamlessly. You must have specialized skills in machine learning, natural language processing, language model development, and data analytics to customize and utilize ChatGPT per your business requirements.
We suggest you partner with skilled developers with experience in designing and developing AI software applications, especially chatbot solutions.
If you are developing a ChatGPT-powered app and need to scale your team with additional skills and expertise then take a moment to tell us about your project requirements here. One of our dedicated tech account managers will be in touch to show you similar projects we have done before and share how we can help you.
FAQs
The applications of ChatGPT are many, from chatbots, virtual assistants, and content generation to personalized app experience, education, and research. ChatGPT can accomplish many creative tasks like writing complete app code or testing just a part of it.
The term Chat in ChatGPT refers to its functionality of generating chat-like conversations by simulating human responses using advanced generative AI technology. The GPT refers to a large language model (LLM), a generative pre-trained transformer which is the underlying architecture and approach to training the ChatGPT model.
OpenAI, an AI research company, launched ChatGPT to generate human-like chat based on given prompts. Chatbots are applications that interact with users and use different technologies, including AI. While ChatGPT writes plausible-sounding text, it can struggle with understanding complex human language and conversation contexts. It is also sensitive to input phrasing and gives different responses on using the same prompt multiple times. Advanced AI chatbots, on the other hand, can be designed to train on large language models and handle complex communication scenarios with features like dialogue management, intent recognition, etc.
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