ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Everywhere you see, people are talking about ChatGPT and how it is going to ‘change the world’. A product that’s barely 4 months old is already being touted as the “Google Killer”. Instead of throwing multiple links at you, ChatGPT gives you the answers upfront. But does it mean that people will stop searching for their queries on Google?

ChatGPT has garnered millions of users in a very short period. AI enthusiasts are all praising the new technology, while less technical-savvy people are worried about its implications and what it could mean in the future. In this article, we’ll take a look at what ChatGPT really is, how it works, and how it stands against the benefits vs risk parameter.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, released its newest AI-powered bot, ChatGPT. It is based on a large language model trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and capable of understanding user inputs written in plain English. No programming language syntax is required.

Based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer, or GPT 3.5 model, the extremely advanced chatbot builds over GPT 3.0 and InstructGPT, the older and less advanced sibling of ChatGPT.

One of the biggest reasons why ChatGPT was able to amass a million users after just a week of launching was its ability to generate human-like responses for any kind of input and its conversational appeal. It can solve math equations, provide answers to a query, translate text, complete essays, and even write code. It can also follow through on previous threads and provide answers based on the ongoing conversation.

The applications, for now at least, are endless.

A New York Times study states that nearly 30 million people are using ChatGPT every day. The AI chatbot has set the record for the fastest-growing user base for a consumer app. It had reached the mark of 100 million monthly users in just two months since its release. A feat that took Tik Tok 9 months, and Instagram nearly two and a half years.

This popularity is due to the applications ChatGPT can be used for. It works flawlessly for language translation, it can summarize long documents or articles instantly, and it can even be used to understand the sentiment and tone of customer feedback or any other piece of writing. Its natural language processing capabilities allow it to be used for several tasks.

Students and content creators can leverage ChatGPT to write college essays and assignments or to take inspiration for their next blog.

App developers can ask programming questions and get direct answers or useful advice in real-time rather than asking questions on forums like StackOverflow and waiting for someone to respond.

Its human-like prompts make it suitable for creating customer service chatbots. It can even help doctors in creating insurance claims for their patients and persuade the insurance company to pay promptly.

With its data processing speed and machine learning algorithms, ChatGPT can revolutionalize the insurance industry. It can streamline the policy selection process and provide personalized recommendations to consumers so that they don’t have to navigate through complex and confusing processes. Statistical data is crucial for insurance companies to perform the risk assessment of an event and the costs associated with it. ChatGPT can provide more accurate risk assessments enabling insurance companies to provide better coverage for customers and accurate premiums.

ChatGPT is great but it’s not perfect. It still has various pitfalls and shortcomings that might not be easy to spot at first glance. Evan Sam Altman, the Chief Executive of OpenAI suggests not to use ChatGPT “for anything important right now” and that they “have lot of work to do on its robustness and truthfulness.”

ChatGPT is not a person. It is a bot that is trained on a large set of data.

The responses it provides are only limited to the data that was fed to the model. If there is not enough data for a particular question or query, the bot might generate irrelevant or completely inaccurate responses as well. OpenAI has also acknowledged this behavior on its website explaining that ChatGPT can sometimes write incorrect or nonsensical answers that sound very plausible to the user. It is also susceptible to producing biased answers depending on how the question is framed or what kind of data it is being fed.

Another concern that a lot of teachers, employees, and business leaders have is the impact ChatGPT will have on our basic creativity. AI solutions are meant to supplement our knowledge and help us execute tasks more efficiently, not make us more dumb.

With the ability to write entire essays or programs at the click of a button, students and developers can misuse the bot and never learn anything on their own. Just recently, the AI chatbot was able to pass the bar exam with great accuracy. This showcases the threat it poses.

The advanced capabilities of ChatGPT can make it a great tool for fraudsters as well. The human-like responses it generates can be used to create a fake customer service bot or insurance claim E-mails that trick people out of their money. For an unsuspecting user, it’ll be near impossible to distinguish between a mail written by a human or generated by a bot.

OpenAI has gone to great lengths to train the model. Vast amounts of data were collected from the Internet to train the bot and the responses were fine-tuned using human supervision, reinforced learning, and Proximal Policy Optimization. However, there are a few limitations to the bot.

It is important to understand that ChatGPT, on its own, knows nothing. All of its answers are coming from text and data harvested from the Internet and then fine-tuned to match user inputs. So even though it may provide an answer that sounds authoritative and correct, it might be entirely incorrect and fictitious. Hence, relying completely on the response provided by the bot without any factual check might not be such a good idea right now.

Another drawback of ChatGPT is its sensitivity to how the question is phrased. The model can sometimes fail to provide any response to a particular question but when the phrasing is tweaked a bit, it can answer correctly. In case of an ambiguous query, instead of clarifying it a bit more, the current model tends to guess the user’s intention and provide an answer anyway.

ChatGPT deserves all the attention it is getting. It might not have killed Google search, as people are claiming it would do, but it is still a great way to get information. Given the recent trends and how frequently people are using the bot, there might come a day when we’ll be outsourcing simple writing tasks to ChatGPT. Just like we did for Maths with calculators, spelling with spell check, and books with the internet.

Implementing ChatGPT comes with its own set of limitations and challenges, but the benefits it provides to the user currently, clearly outweigh the cons. Its impact and potential will depend on how effectively businesses adopt the technology and how frequently it is being used in their processes.

ChatGPT is not the first nor the only AI software that works on a large language model. There will be competitors and this makes generative AI an exciting field in technology right now.