ChatGPT Is the Coolest (and Most Terrifying) New Technology of 2022
When was the last time you were truly surprised by a new technology? Technology is so good these days that you need something completely disruptive to dazzle and impress. I suspect thatChatGPT will do it for you, a chatbot that will answer anything you ask or text you anything you can think of. He probably could have written this article (but don’t say I said it).
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can do anything. This is hardly hyperbole. You can ask ChatGPT a question, and he will answer it not only to the best of his ability, but also as if the answer was written by a person, sometimes even a little verbose. If you ask him to convert 75 degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius, you might get this answer:
A temperature of 75 degrees Fahrenheit is equivalent to about 23.89 degrees Celsius. To convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, you can use the following formula:
Celsius = (Fahrenheit – 32) / 1.8
Using this formula, we can calculate that 75 degrees Fahrenheit is equivalent to (75 – 32) / 1.8 = 23.89 degrees Celsius. This means that 75 degrees Fahrenheit is slightly lower than the average room temperature, which is usually around 25-26 degrees Celsius.
That’s impressive, but to really have fun with ChatGPT, you can ask it to write you something – a poem, a song, a script, whatever – with as many parameters as you can think of. And ChatGPT will write it for you.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me a horror story about a killer garlic clove. He brought back a seven-paragraph story that, while not winning any horror awards, was nevertheless entertaining. Here is an excerpt:
Long ago, in a small Italian village, there lived a clove of garlic unlike any other. He was bigger and sharper than the others, with a dark and sinister aura. No one knew where it came from, but it soon became known as the “killer garlic”.
But from here I can tell ChatGPT to change my history. I asked him to tell the story again, but to go deeper into the backstory of the garlic clove. He posted the same story with a new paragraph:
As it turns out, the killer garlic was cursed by an evil witch who wanted revenge on the villagers for the wrong they did her years ago. She imbued the garlic with dark magic, turning it into a deadly weapon capable of poisoning anyone who ate it.
Inspired. You can do the same with any idea, no matter how complex. “Write a sad Taylor Swift-style pop song about how the smallest kitten in the litter befriends a mouse. After they bond, they are torn apart because they are too different, but they retain warm, albeit painful, memories of their time together. Put on a chorus and a break,” brought fantastic results to Deputy Editor-in-Chief Joel Cunningham. And when I use the same prompt, I get a completely different song.
Here the possibilities are almost endless. One TikTok creator asked ChatGPT to create a weekly meal list for picky eaters, then asked them to put that data into tables to make it easier to read, and then asked them to create a shopping list for those meals. Programmers have sent ChatGPT code snippets to check for bugs, while others have asked them to write code for specific tasks, which it does with flawless execution .
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT isn’t the first AI-powered chatbot to hit the scene, but it’s the first to be so realistic. ChatGPT runs on GPT-3.5 , a language model that the OpenAI developers (the minds behind DALL·E 2 ) taught to create text. This language is paired with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), a model that allows ChatGPT to engage in dialogue rather than plain text. The real fuel, however, is the massive amount of data that OpenAI trained ChatGPT with by pulling human-written information from the Internet. He not only knows a lot, but also knows how to sound human.
Before things get too scary, we’re not in an Age of Ultron situation. For now. ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet, so it cannot communicate outside of its network. It also doesn’t know much about events beyond 2021, so you may find gaps in its capabilities when dealing with anything related to 2022 or beyond. Naturally, I asked him to write a Taylor Swift song about midnights, knowing full well that ChatGPT knew nothing about Taylor’s record-breaking album. Anyway, I liked my AI version of Midnight.
The other genius side of all this is that we are now training the model with our queries. OpenAI uses all of our queries as new learning tools to improve the accuracy and validity of our responses. You can manually provide feedback using the thumbs up and thumbs down icons, and you can add any context to the feedback to help train the model.
To get started, go to the official ChatGPT page . If you do not have an OpenAI account, you will need to register one first. While there are many paid services with OpenAI, the account and ChatGPT are free to use (for now). After authorization, you can start chatting! Warning: This is incredibly addictive.
However, this is not the only chatbot option that OpenAI offers. There’s also a ” Playground “, which gets a little more technical. The idea is the same: you throw queries and requests to the chatbot and it comes up with shockingly impressive results. However, you can customize the process with various controls and settings. You can customize the type of GPT-3 language model that the chatbot uses, the “randomness” of responses, the length of responses, the likelihood that the model will introduce new topics in the invitation, among many others. It’s not as user-friendly as ChatGPT and it’s not completely free as you end up having to pay for tokens to run model tests, but it’s another powerful OpenAI chatbot you can check out right now.