Let's Have A Chat About ChatGPT

Hi, I’m Rick Barron, your host, and welcome to That’s Life, I Swear

We’ve hearing for quite some time now, that robots will soon take over our world. I think the jury is still out on that theory. Speaking of robots, a new robot has entered into the Artificial Intelligence arena on November 30, 2022, and brother is it getting a lot of attention. It’s a new chatbot that shows rapid advances in artificial intelligence. It’s name: ChatGPT.

Let’s jump into this 

What is ChatGPT?

As of late, newspapers, social media channels and news stations have been chatting [pardon the bun] about a new AI technology called ChatGPT.  The ‘GPT’ is an acronym that stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. So, what is it and how and why would you want to use it?

In simple terms, you enter a question and ChatGPT creates content tailored to your request quickly and with a conversation type output. Ask it to write a 200-word essay on how the American Revolution started and bingo.

OpenAI website. Courtesy of OpenAI

It didn’t take long for ChatGPT to gain traction. Within five days of its launch, over a million people were using it. That’s faster than Netflix, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram! This new chatbot comes to us from the good folks at OpenAI. As the public tested the program, many technology experts saw this new chatbot and other chatbots as a potential threat to search engines like Google. Well, maybe, but, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here.

The tool is free at the moment, so like everything else, should this tool take off, get ready to subscribe. The public is just beginning to explore its capabilities, so the possibilities of where ChatGPT will go remain to be seen. 

I took ChatGPT out for a spin. After hearing all the hype about answers to various questions asked, I was curious to see what the excitement was all about. I thought to put it to the test and asked ChatGPT to " write a compelling email from a marketing recruiter that would earn a response from a product marketing manager who typically doesn't respond to recruiters." You can see the results on my website.

The results to my question were quick and the content, fairly boilerplate and somewhat fluffy. Nevertheless, one had to think of the possibilities of what this tool can do such as writing questions to prep for an interview or enhancing one’s resume.

One concern from teachers is that some students who are lazy or feel boxed in without time or skill to do an essay might use the AI app to write their essay for them.

A chatbot like ChatGPT, can serve up information in tight sentences, rather than long lists of blue search links. They explain concepts in ways that people can understand as the content produced comes out in a conversational tone. It can deliver facts while generating business plans, term paper topics and other new ideas from scratch.

There is one caveat. As noted on OpenAI’s website, and I quote: 

“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers… training [keep that thought in mind] the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.” 

End quote

What Makes It Tick?

Earlier I mentioned that on OpenAI’s website it called out, ‘training the model’. What does that mean? ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3.5. That said, GPT-3.5 was conditioned on taking in lots of data and about code and information drawn from the internet, to help ChatGPT learn.

Here’s some technical stats for you. According to Stanford University, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters and was trained on 570 gigabytes of text. For comparison, its predecessor, GPT-2, was over 100 times smaller, at 1.5 billion parameters.

This is only the beginning folks.

When I opened the web ChatGPT tool, the first page provided three columns of information: Examples, Capabilities, and Limitations.

Open screen on ChatGPT. Courtesy of: OpenAI

The Example column provides three sample questions you can ask. Remember that how you phrase the question will determine the answer you receive. 

Capabilities will tell you what ChatGPT can do, such as providing follow-up corrections or being trained to decline inappropriate requests. 

We now come to Limitations. The tool has only limited knowledge. It only knows what it’s been trained to know after the year 2021. Read with caution because the information it generates may have incorrect information.

Example of question submitted but with no answer. Courtesy of: OpenAI

So, how does ChatGPT work? When you open ChatGPT on open.ai, you see this illustration:

How ChatGPT works. Courtesy of: OpenAI

Again, bear in mind how you ask your question as it will influence the output. By phrasing your question one way, the model can claim not to know the answer but, given a slight rephrase, it can answer your question.

That said, I’ve gone back to ask questions that ChatGPT said it didn’t know the answer or how to decipher what I wanted. ChatGPT is learning daily as the questions I asked before, came back with answers!

Possibilities of using ChatGPT

The social media chatter is that ChatGPT will replace Google. Others think it will reduce or even replace some people in many skilled jobs (marketing, software engineering, journalists, etc.). I’m always amazed at the public’s knee-jerk reaction when a new technology is launched. 

ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) language model specifically designed for generating text in a conversational style. Some possible uses for ChatGPT include:

1. Chatbots: ChatGPT can be used to build chatbots that can converse with humans naturally and engagingly. The chatbot can be trained on a large dataset of conversation transcripts, and then use ChatGPT to generate appropriate responses in real-time.
2. Customer service: ChatGPT can automate customer service tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions or troubleshooting issues.
3. Content generation: ChatGPT can be used to generate content in a conversational style, such as social media posts or chatbot scripts.
4. Language translation: ChatGPT can be used to translate text between languages by training it on a large dataset of parallel conversations in different languages.
5. Language modeling: ChatGPT can be used for language modeling tasks, such as predicting the next word in a sentence or generating complete sentences or paragraphs given a prompt.

There’s more here but I think you’re getting the idea of this tools possibilities.

What can we learn from this story? What’s the take away?

ChatGPT interacts with the user in a conversational dialogue form and provides responses that can appear surprisingly human. Overall, ChatGPT represents a promising application of language models for generating human-like responses in a conversational context.

It’s a chatbot that will address follow-up questions, alert you to its limitations, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

While it has it’s limitations, such as prone to make up answers that sound plausible, give it some rope as it’s still very new. OpenAI has said on its website that the tool is a “research release”. Nevertheless, this is a turning point in technology and the advancement of AI. 

I’ve added a link to my Show Notes that you can find at the bottom of this episode on my website, that I recommend helping you get acquainted with ChatGPT. It’s by Adrian Twarog and can be found on YouTube. 

Launch of ChatGPT into Bing and Edge. Courtesy of: TechCrunch

As I was pulling together this episode, sources from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, are saying the company will be adding the popular ChatGPT AI question and answer service to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Microsoft's browser, Edge, will also start using the technology as well. Think this new technology has legs. 

If you want feedback from Search Engine Land on their test drive of the new Bing with ChatGPT integration, click here.

Here's a sneak peek at Google's answer to ChatGPT, Bard.

Launch of ChatGPT into Bing. Courtesy of: TechCrunch

Use your creative minds and inquiries and give ChatGPT a try. I did. Part of this episode's transcript was written using ChatGPT. See if you can find it on my transcript located on my website?

Well, there you go. That's life, I swear.

For further information regarding the material covered in this episode, I invite you to visit my website, that you can find on either Apple Podcasts/iTunes or Google Podcasts, for show notes calling out key pieces of content mentioned and the episode transcript.

As always, I thank you for listening. 

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