What Is ChatGPT? Everything You Need to Know About OpenAI's Chatbot
Even though it's been a few years since ChatGPT's 2022 debut, odds are you're still getting started on your AI journey. We're all learning more about it every day, and knowing how the tech works can help you get the most out of your conversations.
While ChatGPT is easy to use on the surface, many complex computations that are customized to each user are happening behind the scenes. Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on gigantic AI neural networks that can process and generate human-like text, analyze images, and even speak on their own.
How ChatGPT Works
In the most basic sense, ChatGPT is a conversational website or mobile app that fields requests from humans. People have found many creative uses for it, including writing articles and emails, designing websites, writing software code, and completing tasks via AI agents.
While ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot today, others you may hear about include Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude. They're all trained on vast quantities of data, which "teaches" them how to interact with humans in a convincing way. But they're more like aliens constantly trying to learn how to be a human adult.
This learning process happens by feeding the chatbot data, largely from the internet (Wikipedia is a big one), including copyrighted books, YouTube videos, and other original materials. The model learns by taking a chunk of text from the data and trying to predict the next token in the sequence.
Deep Neural Networks and Transformer Networks
This process relies on a software architecture called a deep neural network (DNN), specifically transformer networks. Transformer networks can break down text into "tokens" and predict the sequence that's most likely to make sense with the user based on their interactions.
ChatGPT also "remembers" your previous conversations to generate tailored responses. The more you talk to it, the more it refines its interactions with you. This is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF), and it's what makes ChatGPT so useful.
Using ChatGPT
You can sign up for ChatGPT on OpenAI’s website or on the app (iOS or Android), though you can use the basic version without creating an account.
For serious, ongoing use, you'll want to try the paid version, ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month. OpenAI also offers other subscription tiers, like a $200-per-month Pro model, and Team and Enterprise accounts for large organizations.
Caution When Using ChatGPT
We don't recommend ChatGPT as a research tool because it tends to hallucinate or make up information. LLMs such as ChatGPT can put together text that is factually wrong. A good rule of thumb is to fact-check its output before relying on it.
Several other companies have developed instruction-following LLMs that compare with ChatGPT. For more examples of how AI is being explored, check out our Try AI series.
