What is ChatGPT and How to Use It?

Jun. 5, 2023

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is achatbot powered by AI(Artificial Intelligence), and it has been developed by a company called OpenAI. It is essentially a website where you can have a chat with an AI model. These AI models are also known asLLM (Large Language Model). As the name suggests, “chat” refers to the conversational functionality and GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is a type of LLM. We will come to GPT later in more detail.

At present, ChatGPT lets you chat with two AI models —GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Both of these LLM models have been developed in-house by OpenAI,and they are not open-source. GPT-3.5 is free and available to everyone to use whereas GPT-4 is available only to paying users (those subscribed toChatGPT Plus). Both models are highly conversational and understand the context as well, but GPT-4 is currently the most advanced and capable LLM in the world right now.

Talking about the models briefly, GPT-3.5 is trained on 175 billion parameters whereas GPT-4 is said to be trained on a massive1 trillion parameters, which makes it incredibly capable. On the other hand,Google’s PaLM 2 AIis trained on ~540 billion parameters, making it one of the largest LLMs but still smaller than GPT-4. In addition, GPT-3.5 has a maximum context length of 4096 tokens, whereas GPT-4 can go all the way up to 32,768 tokens. Context length is basically how much information a model can process and produce.

As we mentioned above, GPT is a type of Large Language Model (LLM) that opened the floodgates of generative artificial intelligence. It is based on thetransformer architecture, which is trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate human-like text content. It may come as a surprise but significant contributions to GPT architecture have been made by Google.

It introduced “Attention” to large language models, whichhelps inpredicting the next wordin a sentence without losing context. The Attention mechanism allows the model to focus on different elements of the input and generate each element of the output sequence. Here, the next word is not predicted based on the understanding of natural language like humans do, but based on patterns and statistical inferences and the data LLMs have been trained on.

To sum up, Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) is thebedrock architectureon which all popular Transformer models, including ChatGPT 3.5 and 4, are built. It has advanced the field of natural language processing and continues to push the boundary of AI.

First and foremost, ChatGPT is highly creative (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models). They excel at natural language processing and don’t lose context easily. From writing poems and stories to coming up with absurd ideas and explanations to complex ideas, it’s capable of numerous creative tasks. However,GPT-3.5 is prone to hallucinations as well. It regularly makes up information that does not exist and quotes data out of nowhere.

In this regard,GPT-4 is much better than GPT-3.5. In factual evaluation tests, GPT-4 scored 40% higher than GPT-3.5 across various categories. So if you want to use ChatGPT for research purposes, it’s highly recommended to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month and lets you access the GPT-4 model.

Apart from that, GPT-4 hasexcelled at many academic and professional examsincluding SAT, GRE, Uniform Bar Exam, USMLE, Leetcode, and more. It’s also good at coding, reasoning, comprehension, and solving complex mathematical questions.

Next, you can extend the functionality of the AI chatbot usingChatGPT Plugins. They let youconnect third-party servicesto ChatGPT directly. From booking flight tickets tosummarizing YouTube videos using ChatGPT, you can do just about anything with Plugins. To learn how toenable and use ChatGPT Plugins, follow our linked tutorial.

Then, there is the Code Interpreter Plugin that can run Python code in ChatGPT directly. Your own shell inside ChatGPT, how cool is that? But keep in mind, the Code Interpreter Plugin is not available to all users yet. Finally, GPT-4 is also amultimodal model, which means it can analyze both texts and images. The feature has not been added to ChatGPT yet, but it’s going to change how we interact with AI models.

Sometime in the future, you will be able to ask ChatGPT to draw final impressions from medical reports, get nutritional information from images, and much more. The next-gen GPT-5 model is going to be even more powerful and feature-rich.

There are limitless possibilities with ChatGPT. You canwrite stories, poems, generate music chords, debug and write code, get easy explanations of abstract concepts, solve mathematical and reasoning questions, and much more. We have a long list ofcool things you can do with ChatGPT. People are increasingly usingChatGPT to write essaysand fortravel planningas well.

Apart from that, you canmake money with ChatGPTby creating apps and websites, affiliate marketing, writing e-books, starting an online business, and more. You can alsobuild a custom AI chatbotbased on your own data.

If you are a programmer, you canuse ChatGPT to write codein VS Code and your favorite IDEs. It’s also good atfinding errors in codeand fixing them for you. I have been using ChatGPT for the past many months for a variety of tasks, and it has always impressed me.

To use ChatGPT, you canvisitthe chat.openai.com websiteand create a free OpenAI account. After signing in, you can chat with the free GPT-3.5 model without any limitations.

However, if you want to use ChatGPT for serious work, I would strongly suggestsubscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which will open access to the powerful GPT-4 model.

In case, you don’t want to pay $20 per month, you canuse ChatGPT 4 for freeusing Bing Chat and other third-party services.Bing AI Chat(“Creative mode”) ispowered by ChatGPT 4and also offers a longer context window. You can evenuse Bing AI Chat in any web browserof your choice.

If you want to check out alternatives to ChatGPT, well, you canstart with Google Bard. Similar to ChatGPT,Bard AI is Google’s large language modelbuilt on the latest PaLM 2 AI model. It is not as capable as GPT-4, but for many other tasks, Bard is quite comparable. Furthermore, you can check out Bing AI Chat which is built on GPT-4 and offers 300 chats per day (30 per session).

Next, you can check outAnthropic’s Claude AI, which is considered arival to ChatGPT. It also brought a 100K tokens context window, which has not been seen in ChatGPT or other LLMs before. To find more suchfree ChatGPT alternatives, you can head over to our linked article.

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