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What Is ChatGPT and How Does It Work? All You Need to Know

December 22, 2024

what is ChatGPT

Human's ability to speak and write flawlessly is an outcome of evolution. As AI progresses, these intricate, brain-based traits are being replicated in computers.

For years, computers have relied on gated recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or long short-term memory (LSTM) to edit, translate, and summarize textual data. As the amount of data grows and models are trained more effectively, AI chatbots have taken over these tasks.

These newer bots can interpret, translate, and produce synthetic text more efficiently. If you’re curious about AI chatbots, in particular, what is ChatGPT and how it can make your tasks easier, read on!

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT is trained on generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), particularly GPT-3.5, which are large language models (LLM), a type of artificial neural network. 

The model is fed with large volumes of training data created by scraping online structured or unstructured data. This online data is taken from URLs, articles, publications, and human demonstrations, along with manually fed content. 

The data is then fine-tuned with transformer models that follow a “multi-head attention mechanism” to understand the positions of the words, send them to the decoder, and predict the next follow-up word with utmost accuracy.

The AI model is trained on such a massive dataset, and each layer of the model is assigned a “weight” or “parameter.” These weights help decide which words in the input sequence should be attended to the most and which words can be discarded.

Learning from a seed input helps the algorithm create relations between words and apply natural language processing (NLP) and language rules before displaying output. 

ChatGPT only displays information after fact-checking numbers, metrics, and data within its training dataset.

What is ChatGPT Plus?

ChatGPT Plus is a fast-paced, smarter, and costlier version of ChatGPT that runs on GPT-4 architecture. It is trained on much more advanced datasets, which are larger and more efficient predictive algorithms.

Even the most-priced plan of ChatGPT isn’t that costly, at $20 per month. And the reason is that the tool is open to commercial feedback and ratings for now. Once ChatGPT gains the desired accuracy rate, the subscription rates will skyrocket.

ChatGPT Plus generally offers much more advanced capabilities than the free account. It offers faster response times, a slew of new advanced features, and an improved user experience.

ChatGPT Plus is slowly becoming the preferred writing tool for organizations to generate critical content blocks across industries. But is ChatGPT Plus worth it? Check it here.

chatgpt vs chatgpt plus

Did you know? Microsoft Bing has recently integrated GPT-4 LLM into their search engine optimization process to articulate SERP suggestions and personalize search intent.

How to use ChatGPT

Currently, ChatGPT is under research and development. Its latest version, ChatGPT Plus, has been priced at $20 per month due to the high-grade GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 API it uses. In any case, how you access and work on ChatGPT is the same.

To access ChatGPT, you need to create an Open AI account.:

  1. Go to “openai.com,” and select “Try ChatGPT”

introducing chatgpt

2. Users will be directed to the authentication window of ChatGPT. Sign up using your existing email address. Users with existing Gmail, Apple, and Microsoft accounts can log in directly.chatgpt login

3. Set your password. The password should be eight characters long and satisfy basic password security requirements.

4. The OpenAI server will send a verification link to your email ID as the app follows a two-factor authentication process. Open and select the URL link.chatgpt verification

5. Feed in your basic details.

6. Enter your phone number to receive a one-time authentication password (or OTP). The system will prompt you to receive the code via WhatsApp or SMS.

7. The system generates a visual puzzle for you to solve before moving forward. This is done to eliminate bots from accessing the system.

8. Enter the authentication code.

9. Voila! The onboarding process is now complete. Enter your prompts in the message box at the bottom of the screen and get your desired responses from the ChatGPT database.

The ChatGPT account window

The main user interface or ChatGPT window is self-explanatory and rudimentary. But even in this stage, the complexity of machine learning is reflected through the following components.

ChatGPT launch interface

The launch interface is the window you will see right after you complete your sign-up process for ChatGPT.

chatgpt launch

It is a self-explanatory window with a few essential features. This window also contains
disclaimers
on examples, capabilities, and limitations of ChatGPT.

  • Examples: This section acquaints you with the questions you can propose. Using simple catchphrases, keywords, or topics in your query will help the tool work its magic. You can type your queries in the message box below the “ChatGPT” section.
  • Capabilities: This section is a brush-up or reminder of the uses of ChatGPT. Give this section a read and understand what ChatGPT can be used for within your business circle.
  • Limitations: As AI is nascent, this section narrates the possible issues or challenges you can face with AI content and warns you to be mindful of that.

After you enter an input or “seed text,” the ChatGPT prompt engineering model activates. 

chatgpt window

  • New Chat: To start a new conversation, select the new chat button present at the top right corner of the window.
  • Chat heads with timelines: The right-hand side of the screen also has different chat heads along with their timelines. The title of the chat head would be a variation of the “first query” written in that particular chat. Here is where your entire chat history is stored.
  • Upgrade to Plus: It is an inbuilt upgrade that puts you on your licensed plan account for ChatGPT.
  • Message box: This area is where users can type out their queries for ChatGPT to respond to their requirements. When we say “prompts,” it doesn’t mean random spins on sentences. A prompt is a lucrative way of requesting adequate information on a topic.
  • Free research preview: As the model is commercialized, this footnote tells users that it is free to use during the research and experimentation process.
  • Release notes:  The footnote also contains information regarding the “latest version” of ChatGPT. Select the faint link, and you will be redirected to the product release page, where you can stay informed of the latest iOS and Android updates and countries permitting mobile app downloads.
  • Regenerate response: If the result isn’t up to your expectation, you can recalibrate the ChatGPT response algorithm. Internally trained on the principles of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RHLF), the algorithm is trained with a reward model with two model responses for each input set.
  • Save and submit/Cancel: You will find an icon on the right-hand side of your query. You can save and submit one page from here and move to the next page in the same search window. To cancel the action, select “Cancel.”
  • Copy, thumbs up and down. The copy feature appears on the right-hand side of the generated response. It helps copy the entire block of text. With the thumbs up and down feature, you can provide additional feedback to Open AI on how they can improve their algorithm.
  • Help and FAQ: In the bottom right corner, right after your name, you will find a “Help and FAQ” section that leads you to the FAQ page of ChatGPT.
  • Clear conversations: Selecting this option will clear all your accumulated chat histories.

This is a list of additional features and add-ons for the user to get acquainted with the ChatGPT interface and operate it with ease.

What is Ask ChatGPT?

Ask ChatGPT is a browser plugin that allows you to ask questions right from your omni bar or search bar of Google Chrome. Submit a query, press enter, and you will be redirected to the ChatGPT web browser application.

  • Go to a new tab. Write “GPT” followed by a space. Press the tab to activate the extension if you have already installed the plugin.
  • After putting in the space, enter your query.
  • The system will automatically redirect you to chat.openai.com without any additional steps.
  • Insert any query you like from your search bar and get the answers you like.

The extension detects whether you have logged in to ChatGPT or not. If not, you will see the message  "You seem not to be logged in! Please log in and press enter.

Benefits of ChatGPT

Though ChatGPT is still in the research and experimentation phase, it has already rolled out some great yields. Getting a reader’s mindset is so difficult, but with ChatGPT, it is nothing but a breeze.

ChatGPT integration resulted in some quick and long-term improvements and benefits for teams. Some of them are:

  • Revenue optimization: By staying up to par with their content funnel, businesses generated more MQLs, giving golden revenue conversions.
  • Deadline compliance: With ChatGPT, you can play around with prompts and build creative newsletters, emails, subject lines, ads, and flyers. Adjusting and editing automated content can help hit goals and achieve the target faster.
  • Manual documentation: ChatGPT helps in the initial stages of project scoping and framework. It can create deck outlines, shortlist topics, and nitpick advanced reports and surveys for your project teams. It makes the life of a project leader simpler.
  • Writing block: Although freelancers and content writers are marquees of their field, they are not immune to writer’s block. ChatGPT helps overcome writer’s block by publishing a quick introduction. An automated introduction gives a solid lead for content writers who take the article until the end.
  • Increased productivity and efficiency: In a recent survey done by Fishbowl on 4500 workers, almost 30% used AI assistants like ChatGPT. Generating texts for editorial tasks or quarterly goals can increase visibility, get them recognition, and eliminate any scope of burnout.
  • SEO: Not only does ChatGPT produce high-quality and refined pieces of content, it also helps you master your SEO. Create effective keyword outlines, spot content gaps, optimize meta tags, and audit content with a few written prompts and phrases. Having a strong SEO foundation boosts your page rank and increases monthly visitors.

While the benefits are endless, it is important to note that AI is in a nascent stage. AI for business processes at a large scale may result in a potential problem.

ChatGPT limitations

While some companies are promoting ChatGPT, other experienced users are slowing down the pace of AI a bit. AI remains raw in a few places while simulating human behavior in others. 

  • Improper sentiment mapping: ChatGPT faces trouble collecting sitemap or web data from high-authority domains. The domains are heavily encrypted, so the tool cannot break into such datasets without a powerful supervised algorithm.  As ChatGPT focuses on unsupervised and unstructured data, it can’t manage web behaviors and help you understand your potential target market.
  • Google’s search behavior: Even with generative AI tools like Bard or Synthesia and technologies like BERT, NLP, or diffusion models, it is hard to eliminate noise from the internet. Google’s search engine is still centered on human-written content. It would take a little while before AI replaces the first SERP of web search engines.
  • Redundancy: At the end of the day, ChatGPT is a conversational AI bot. Self-evolving conversational bots can double down on the same answer. It can show mixed-up answers, repeated phrases, or homogenous paragraphs. Ambiguity and repetition of words and sentences don't make it ideal for client-side content.  

Future of ChatGPT

With the progression of time, the AI maturity of ChatGPT will only increase. 

Advancements in generative adversarial networks will give way to a new computing nervous system with reactive and self-aware capabilities. You could sit opposite an AI component in a chess or carrom game and still lose.

As the great scientist Stephen Hawking had once predicted, AI can design improvements to itself and conquer humankind. As the graph gets more technical, the dominance of AI will become inevitable. Newer trends, tools, and methods will simulate emotional intelligence completely. 

The residuals or outliers in the output might be an excuse for a laugh now. However, with neural networks and more big data, the algorithms will get more powerful, and the training process will quicken.

Talent writers are known for implicit analogy-building and creativity. In the future, newer APIs like GPT-5 (Turing 5) would have a trillion parameters and weights, generating much more permutations and combinations of words and creativity. 

It would be impossible to break the streak of AI from automating the entire spectrum of content!

Business and new generative AI technologies

AI is still trying to perfect its algorithms and reduce bias. There are various scenarios where users haven’t found ChatGPT up to the mark. Either the tool doesn’t understand the sensitivity of the prompt, or it produces the same redundant result. To be used in scenarios where the client is particular with briefs, ChatGPT will be of little use. 

Pitching to clients with a well-laid-out content brief is an innate skill. For now, writers are irreplaceable. But as AI opens up to more content samples, ideas, briefs and content marketing strategies, it would wire its mechanism to create its own strategies. But that’s more of a decade-down-the-line phenomenon. Even then, writers who work with AI tools would be ahead of the competition. 

So, experimenting with chatGPT for different content verticals and avenues is the right call for now. Exploring the depths of its training datasets, feeding different prompts, and creating prompt threads will help you regenerate good responses.
ChatGPT will also be monumental in generating project text data, feature-based plugins, social media captions, and digital marketing strategies, which would improve the subscriber count, traffic count, and brand visibility of companies.

Example prompts for ChatGPT

ChatGPT can be fed with a gazillion prompts and can produce infinite results. Whether you are adding a new feature to your plugin, debugging code, or creating content, submit a query or prompt to ChatGPT, which will learn from your prompt, look for a viable alternative, and generate a response.

Overlay unlimited APIs, add keys and features, generate a list of follow-up questions, and see ChatGPT get better and more succinct with each response. 

1. Write a string reverse program that accepts a six-character input and reverses it in a new line. 

chatgpt reverse

2. Write a 300-word essay on the “future of quantum computing” in a casual, persuasive tone.

chatgpt essay

In this example, you can see that ChatGPT didn’t quite get the memo of casual and persuasive. The introduction and flowery paragraphs don’t really explain quantum computing.

3. Find the output of the following HTML code: 

code

4. Write a brief introductory paragraph on omnichannel marketing

chatgpt

5. Explain the concept of marketing automation to a five-year-old.

chatgpt introduction

6. List a brief workout routine for good health

chatgpt

7. Write a C++ code to check whether 321 is a palindrome or not.

chatgpt code

ChatGPT goes one step further to inform you about function declarations and definitions.

chatgpt

8. Write a social media caption for virtual reality

chatgpt caption

AI categories listed on G2

  • Machine learning software can work with your existing company datasets to create business forecasts and automate process workflows.
  • AI software uses standard ERP data and applies powerful machine learning and deep learning methods to forecast business strategies.
  • Generative AI software works on a transformer-based architecture to automate content distribution and language translation.
  • AI writing assistant software helps with writing creative and meaningful copies, editing drafts, and checking for spelling and grammatical errors.
  • Synthetic media software uses deep learning algorithms to cultivate multimedia files, audio, video, images, and artwork.
  • Large language models (LLM) are specially designed to understand, comprehend, generate, summarize, translate, and build responses to human-generated input prompts and do fast calculations or interpretations compared to a human brain. 

Click to chat with G2's Monty-AI

ChatGPT: Frequently answered questions (FAQs)

1. Who created ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization based in San Francisco, California.

2. Is ChatGPT free?

Yes, ChatGPT offers a free tier. However, there are subscription plans like ChatGPT Plus for enhanced features and performance.

3. Does ChatGPT have an app?

Yes, ChatGPT has mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices, making it easy to use on the go.

4. Can ChatGPT generate images?

While ChatGPT primarily focuses on text-based responses, its latest integration with DALL·E allows it to generate images based on text prompts.

5. Is ChatGPT safe to use?

While ChatGPT prioritizes user safety by filtering harmful content, it is advisable to avoid sharing sensitive personal information.

6. Does ChatGPT save your chats?

ChatGPT may retain conversations for training and quality purposes, but there are features you can use to manage data privacy. Check their policy for specifics.

7. Is ChatGPT accurate?

While the earlier versions of ChatGPT were limited by knowledge cutoffs, the recent updates suggest that newer models can browse the internet for real-time information. It's best to verify critical information.

Augmented by AI, accepted by people

Scientists are trying to inherit AI with way more capabilities than it already has. The future holds many innovations and improved technology.  For now, embracing and working in harmony with the change is the solution. The sustainable development of mankind depends on AI and vice versa.

Be the master of the tech industry by learning about the different types of artificial intelligence being experimented on globally.


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