What is the ChatGPT bot wowing academics and tech CEOs with its writing skills?

A new AI-powered chatbot is making waves on social media.

The Elon Musk-founded Open AI’s ChatGPT bot is wowing many with its writings.

Its CEO Sam Altman has said that over a million users had tried to make the tool talk within a week of ChatGPT being launched on 30 November.

The Open AI website describes itself as an AI research and deployment company whose mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

OpenAI, a research and development firm, was founded as a non-profit in 2015 by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman and billionaire Elon Musk and attracted funding from several others, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

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In 2019, the group created a related for-profit entity to take in outside investment.

But what is the ChatGPT bot? How does it work?

Let’s take a closer look:

What is it?

ChatGPT is simply the latest version of the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer [GPT] family of text-generating AIs.

ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response, as per the website.

Open AI on its website said its "dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests."

How does it work?

The Open AI website says ChatGPT was trained with "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback."

The website adds, "We trained an initial model using supervised fine-tuning: human AI trainers provided conversations in which they played both sides—the user and an AI assistant."

The version of the bot available for public testing attempts to understand questions posed by users and responds with in-depth answers resembling human-written text in a conversational format.

It can be used for digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries or as some users have found, even to help debug code.

Academics have been left impressed – with some saying on social media that responses generated to exam queries would have resulted in full marks if submitted by undergrads, as per The Guardian.

Programmers have also used ChatGPT to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds.

Musk, who remains engulfed in his overhaul of social networking firm Twitter, left Open AI’s board in 2018, but chimed in with his take on the viral phenomenon, calling it "scary good".

Equally impressed was Box CEO Aaron Levie, who wrote on Twitter, “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.

The bot is currently in beta testing mode and is free to use.

But that may not be the case in the future.

When Musk recently asked Altman on Twitter about the average cost per ChatGPT chat, the CEO replied: “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”

Musk later tweeted that he was pausing Open AI’s access to Twitter’s database after learning that the firm was using it to "train" the tool.

“Need to understand more about governance structure [and] revenue plans going forward,” he added, as per The Guardian. “Open AI was started as open-source and non-profit. Neither are still true.”

What are its limitations?

As with many AI-driven innovations, ChatGPT does not come without its shortcomings.

Open AI has also acknowledged the tool’s tendency to respond with "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."

This is because there is no source of truth in the data they use to train the model and supervised training can also be misleading “because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows,” Open AI has said.

While some have argued the bot could eventually replace journalists, that possibility remains some way off.

The chatbot lacks the nuance, critical-thinking skills or ethical decision-making ability that are essential for successful journalism, as per The Guardian.

AI technology in general can also perpetuate societal biases like those around race, gender and culture.

Tech giants including Alphabet Inc's Google and Amazon. have previously acknowledged that some of their projects that experimented with AI were "ethically dicey" and had limitations.

At several companies, humans had to step in and fix AI havoc.

Despite these concerns, AI research remains attractive.

Venture capital investment in AI development and operations companies rose last year to nearly $13 billion, and $6 billion had poured in through October this year, according to data from PitchBook, a Seattle company tracking financings.

With inputs from agencies

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