ChatGPT for Dummies

The last couple of months my LinkedIn feed has been overwhelmed with posts about the new kid on the block called chatGPT. This gives the feeling that this AI-tool is already a mainstream tool known by everyone.

Nonetheless when talking to friends and family less involved in IT or not working in the Tech sector, chatGTP appears still to be an unknown. Therefore I thought it might be interesting to give an introduction to chatGPT for dummies, so let’s start with the basics.

What is chatGPT?

ChatGPT (abbreviation for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer) is a tool, based on a large AI-based language model, which allows to generate human-like text (i.e. indistinguishable from text written by humans).

The model, trained on millions of texts found on the internet (exact amount is not publicly known, but believed to be in the range of hundreds of billions of words), generates texts by adding each time the word which has the highest correlation with all previous words in the conversation. As such it can be used to generate any content (e.g. blogs, poems, market studies…), reply questions, but also execute more specific tasks, like e.g. generating programming code, translating texts, summarizing long documents, analyzing the sentiment of texts… As such it is generally recognized as the most advanced AI chatbot at the moment.

You can access it by going to https://chat.openai.com/ and registering. Afterwards you can converse with chatGPT for free (for now at least, it is likely that it will become paying in the future).

The success of chatGPT is enormous. In the first 5 days after its launch (on November 30, 2022) it counted already 1 million users (it took Facebook 10 months and Instagram 2,5 months to reach same numbers) and two months after its launch it reported to have 100 million users (it took TikTok 9 months and Instagram 2,5 years to reach this number of users).
It comes therefore as no surprise that Google initiated internally a code red, as they fear that chatGPT could be a danger for their flag product and core revenue source, i.e. the Google Search Engine.

Who is behind chatGPT?

ChatGPT is made available by OpenAI, which is together with DeepMind (part of the Google-Alphabet group and most famous for the AI model AlphaGo, which won in Go against the world champion) the most prominent player on the AI market at the moment.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 in San Francisco as a non-profit organisation to promote and research artificial intelligence (AI). The founders of the organisation are all famous Tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (Paypal co-founder and one the most known tech investors in Silicon Valley), Sam Altman (former president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator and now CEO of OpenAI), Jessica Livingston (founding partner of Y Combinator), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn)…
In 2019 it transitioned into a commercial (for profit) company, with Microsoft investing heavily in the company, i.e. in 2019 Microsoft already invested $1 billion in the company and in January 2023 Microsoft announced a multi-year investment of $10 billion. Additionally Microsoft is planning to integrate chatGPT in its search engine Bing, which could be a game-changer, allowing for Bing to break the dominant position of Google Search Engine.

ChatGPT is furthermore not the only successful AI model offered by OpenAI. E.g. in 2021, OpenAI also launched Dall-E, which is an AI tool that allows to generate any kind of digital image based on a natural language description.

Should I use it?

chatGPT is incredibly powerful and versatile, as it can generate any content in any style in a matter of minutes. As such it can be an enormous aid for increasing the productivity of any knowledge worker. While the quality, speed and efficiency of the output of chatGPT is amazing, it comes still with a few limitations as well. As such the content produced by chatGPT should not be copy/pasted without any reflection and revision.

Typical limitations of chatGPT are:

The model is only as good as the data it was trained on. As the model was trained on public internet pages, some training data can be biased, erroneous or of low-quality, which will reflect also in the answers of chatGPT. The more specific the topic of the prompt, the more limited the training data set will have been, meaning a higher chance for quality issues.
Especially the inherent bias of the model can be problematic and has already resulted in ethical debates. Numerous examples circulate on the internet where chatGPT showed strong bias and generated even discriminatory or even racist replies.
The generation of its output is very computationally intensive and requires significant resources. This can make it difficult or costly to use in certain settings, such as on low-power devices or in real-time applications. The CEO of OpenAI already mentionned in an interview that the cost per question is a few dollar cents. This seems low, but considering 100 million users executing several prompts each, you can do the math of how much money is being spent by OpenAI at the moment. You could argue that this money could be spent much better, as the majority of prompts are just for recreation and could be solved just as easily by a Google Search, which is much cheaper.
Due to its success, the system has become quite overloaded, which results in regular unavailability and general slowness for processing prompts. OpenAI has recently launched a paying service called ChatGPT Plus (at 20$ / month), which allows to get priority (i.e. access during peak times), faster responses and priority access to new features and improvements.
ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff is September 2021, which means it is based on information that was available up until that date. It may not have knowledge of events or updates that have occurred since then.
Despite its incredible complexity, ChatGPT is still only a model that determines the best correlating word based on all previous conversation. This means the model does not have a deep understanding of the world or the ability to reason like a human. As a result some responses might be completely incorrect.

Some of those limitations are expected to be improved in the next version, i.e. GPTI 4, which is expected to be released in 2023.

In conclusion, yes you should use it, because it can help you enormously in improving your productivity, but remain sceptical of the result and use it only as a support tool.

How should I use it?

As mentioned before, after you are logged in, you can just ask any question and the reply will be formulated. After this reply, you can ask follow-up questions. In these follow-up questions, chatGPT will take into account the preceding conversation.

But the way you ask your question will also impact the quality of the response. The more precise your question the better the result and it’s advised to use certain guidelines (standards) in the question. Some people have already made it their profession to help companies providing the best prompts to chatGPT.

A good prompt typically consists of 3 parts:

First tell chatGPT who you are. This is done by a phrase like "Act like a …" or "You are a…" (e.g. "Act like a copywriting expert" or "You’re an expert career advisor"). Additionally you can provide more context allowing to really set the scene.
Then explain what you expect, i.e. define a task to complete (e.g. via "Your task is now to…"). Optionally you can provide additional specific context of your domain. This will help chatGPT to be more accurate.
Finally explain how. Often this is done by expressing the language, the style (e.g. "In the style of …") or the format (e.g. "In 5 bullet points") you want the reply to be in.

Some other good practices are:

Try to be as specific as possible in your prompts, i.e. the more specific the better the results will be.
Use correct language, i.e. avoid grammar mistakes, abbreviations or informal language
Ask to-the-point questions and avoid combining multiple questions in 1 prompt
As chatGPT keeps track of all previous context, ask follow-up questions on a reply, as those allow the model to provide answers with much more context and more tailered to your need.

You can find some ideas of prompts on https://www.awesomegptprompts.com/ or https://www.temok.com/blog/chatgpt-prompts/.

The most important is of course to try it out yourself and play with the system, until it gives you the desired result. There are no wrong prompts, but with some practice and the above tips, the results you will get will be much more valuable.

Note: some phrases in this blog were generated by chatGPT.
Note 2: the picture associated to this blog was generated by Dall-E.

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