A new advanced AI chatbot has emerged, taking over Twitter and presenting a new era of technology to the public.
ChatGPT is a new advanced artificial intelligence chatbot created by the tech company OpenAI. The software was opened for testing last week with over one million users testing the site, according to OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman.
ChatGPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer” and is the next iteration of OpenAI’s GPT-3 chatbot.
It is one of the first consumer-based AI of its kind to have a free, easy-to-use interface. Other chatbot softwares do not remember past responses and often get flooded with inappropriate prompts. OpenAI has claimed to solve many of these problems. In a blog post, the company said that the “format makes it possible for the tool to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose called the software, “quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public.”
The software can remember what questions users have asked before. However, its knowledge is limited to data it learned prior to 2021, so answers to topical questions may be outdated. OpenAI has programmed the AI bot to refuse “inappropriate requests” including generating instructions for illegal activities. While the programming is helpful in eliminating such requests, it is not foolproof.
“While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior,” a statement reads on the company’s website. “We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now. We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.”
OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company, has also released DALL-E, a popular AI photo generator website. Both ChatGPT and DALL-E have taken over social media with users sharing their own AI-generated content. ChatGPT can generate jokes, solve computer coding errors, provide paragraphs of marketing copy and write educational essay answers. The site is so popular that it was shut down briefly on Monday following “exceptionally high demand.”
One user on Twitter asked the chatbot to explain AI alignment while writing “every sentence in the speaking style of a guy who won’t stop going on tangents to brag about how big the pumpkins he grew are.” The bot provided a stunningly accurate response.
Another user had the chatbot write four paragraphs, answering a prompt for his college-level history class assignment.
I guess GPT-3 is old news, but playing with OpenAI’s new chatbot is mindblowing. https://t.co/so1TuXMQB0
We’re witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime. Here’s the response to a prompt from one of my 200-level history classes at Amherst
Solid A- work in 10 seconds pic.twitter.com/z1KPxiAc1O
— Corry Wang (@corry_wang) December 1, 2022
The new software is becoming popular with consumers as well as across the tech industry.
Aaron Levie, the CEO of the virtual cloud storage company Box, has praised the software in a series of tweets in which he asked the chatbot to complete complex business and marketing strategy outlines.
“There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT,” Levie said on Twitter.
In a separate tweet, Levie calls the development of ChatGPT “one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.”
