ChatGPT: Everything You Really Need To Know (In Simple Terms)

Unless you’ve been living off-grid for the past few weeks, you’ve probably
noticed that the internet is abuzz with excitement about ChatGPT, an AI-
based chatbot system that uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate
conversations.

ChatGPT enables users to ask questions or tell a story, and the bot will
respond with relevant, natural-sounding answers and topics. The interface is
designed to simulate a human conversation, creating natural engagement with
the bot.

Based on GPT-3.5, a language model trained to produce text, ChatGPT is

optimized for conversational dialogue using Reinforcement Learning with
Human Feedback (RLHF). Responses from ChatGPT sound quite human-like
because they were trained on vast amounts of data written by people.

So what do you need to know about this latest AI-based chatbot system?
Here’s a primer that will give you everything you need to know to get started.

Who Created ChatGPT?

OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI and research company, launched ChatGPT

on November 30, 2022. OpenAI also created Whisper, an automatic speech
recognition system, and DALLE•2, a popular AI image and art generator.

In the past few years, top research labs have made big strides with AI-
generated text tools like ChatGPT, training the bots on billions of written
words, including everything from blog posts to classic books.
With the release of ChatGPT, easy-to-use AI-based text generators are now
accessible to the masses. The beta version of ChatGPT has already attracted
over a million users.

ChatGPT is specifically designed to mimic real conversations, and the bot is

capable of explaining, remembering what was said earlier in the conversation,
elaborating on ideas when asked, and even apologizing when it gets things
wrong.

How Can You Use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can be used for a variety of applications, including customer service,

online shopping, hiring and training staff, streamlining operations, and
providing more personalized customer experiences.

ChatGPT can also be used to create interactive storytelling experiences,

allowing users to explore and learn from virtual worlds.

Some use cases for ChatGPT include:

● Generating responses in a chatbot or virtual assistant, to provide more

natural and engaging interactions with users

● Brainstorming content ideas on keywords or topics

● Creating personalized communication, such as email responses or product

recommendations

● Creating marketing content like blog posts or social media updates

● Translating text from one language to another

● Recapping long documents by providing the full text and asking ChatGPT to
generate a shorter summary

● Using chatbot-generated answers to create automated customer service

tools

If you’re a business leader and you’re looking for ways to make content
creation easier or provide customers with a more personalized experience,
ChatGPT can be a great tool for you.
How to Get Started With ChatGPT

ChatGPT is in beta right now, and you can get started by going
to chat.openai.com. Click “Sign Up” to set up your account.

Once you’ve created your account, ChatGPT will provide examples of what you
can do with the tool, and help you through the process of running your first
queries.

Right now, ChatGPT is free to use — but the company admits they may need
to monetize in the future to deal with “eye-watering” compute costs.

The Limitations of ChatGPT

Although ChatGPT is a powerful AI-based chatbot system, it does have some

limitations. It can only provide answers based on the data it has been trained
on.

ChatGPT is not a search engine, therefore it does not have the ability to search
the internet for information. Rather, it uses the information it learned from
training data to generate responses. This leaves room for error — so all output
should be fact-checked for accuracy and timeliness.

The chatbot may not be able to provide in-depth information or understand

context or nuances in conversation.

As with all AI tools, all business leaders should be aware of the dangers of
potential bias. If the data ChatGPT is trained on is biased, the answers the bot
provides will be biased, as well. All companies need to be vigilant about
monitoring output from the chatbot to ensure it is free of bias and offensive
content.

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The 20 skills and competencies everyone needs to succeed in a digital world’
and ‘Business Trends in Practice, which just won the 2022 Business Book of
the Year award.

Experts say ChatGPT could be a game-changer

for Microsoft, as CEO Satya Nadella announces
plans to roll out the technology across all of the
company’s products.

Microsoft plans to make OpenAI’s generative AI technology such as

ChatGPT available to billions of users by integrating it into all of its
products, CEO Satya Nadella said this week. That means that
ChatGPT’s ability to generate text through short prompts is likely on
its way to the Office 365 product suite, including Microsoft Word,
PowerPoint and Outlook.

Using OpenAI’s models, Microsoft Word’s autocomplete and

autocorrect features could carry out more advanced tasks than style
and grammar correction and generate longer chunks of text based on
a few words. Though the company hasn’t announced any specific
features yet, users could potentially be able to input prompts and
generate complete PowerPoint presentations and emails.

These kinds of features could help Microsoft attract younger users.

While Microsoft Office 365 has been a de facto standard for millions
of enterprises, analysts say the tech giant has fallen behind in
attracting those who gravitate toward collaborative-first products like
Google Docs and Sheets.

“Microsoft has lost significant traction versus Google, especially in

the education vertical and younger demographics across colleges and
there's a generation that uses Google Docs as their default. Microsoft
needs to change that,” Dan Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities,
told Forbes. “I think ChatGPT would be the silver bullet that could
change the paradigm between Google Docs and Microsoft Word.”
Along with bringing ChatGPT to its consumer-facing products,
Microsoft announced this week that it will also be implementing
OpenAI’s technology in Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure
OpenAI Service, which will allow paying customers to access
advanced AI models including GPT-3.5, the large language model
underlying ChatGPT, and Dall E 2, the image generator.

In 2019, the Seattle-based tech giant invested $1 billion in OpenAI,

became the AI research and development lab’s exclusive cloud
provider and obtained an exclusive license to use and commercialize
OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology. Microsoft is now reportedly in talks to
invest $10 billion in the hot AI startup.

“I think ChatGPT would be the

silver bullet that could change the
paradigm between Google Docs and
Microsoft Word.”
Dan Ives, tech analyst at Wedbush Securities

Google Workspace which encompasses collaborative tools like Google

Drive, Docs, Meet, Slides and more had 3 billion users in 2021 – a
statistic that includes unpaid subscribers as well as businesses. In
2021, Google Workspace had seven million paying subscribers, far
lower than Office 365 paying customer base. Office 365,
which consists of collaborative versions of Word, Excel, Outlook and
other productivity apps, had 54.1 million consumer subscribers and
more than 300 million paid commercial subscribers in 2021, who pay
between $6 and $22 per user per month based on different plans.
Google offers its Workspace tools for competitive pricing, which
ranges between $6 and $18 per user per month (in 2022, Google
discontinued Workspace’s free edition for businesses).

“Microsoft's weak spot is on the consumer, and that’s where Google

thrives,” Ives says. “Implementing ChatGPT and artificial intelligence
will really put gasoline in the growth engine on the consumer side.”

Microsoft has already introduced some AI features into its

software: Microsoft Editor uses AI to correct writing tone, offer
concise alternatives to sentences and generate summaries of long
pieces of text, features that could be improved using ChatGPT’s
technology. In 2020, the company announced that its Azure AI
customers can use AI to caption images.

“For many years, Microsoft has built templates that can be used
inside of Office, particularly Word and PowerPoint. Think about what
they could do now... They'll just say, put in five keywords. And we'll
write a letter for you,” says David Steinberg, CEO and cofounder of
AI-based marketing firm Zeta Global. He added: “It's going to be
very, very powerful.”

Along with competing on collaboration and workspace products,

Google and Microsoft are also head-to-head competitors on other
fronts, including search. Microsoft has indicated that it plans to use
OpenAI’s natural and human-sounding chatbot ChatGPT to improve
Microsoft’s web search engine Bing.

Experts say Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing infrastructure and

access to vast amounts of data could help it supercharge OpenAI’s
models. The Microsoft Graph is one the largest datasets of human
activity at work and contains data from across the company’s
applications, including 400 billion emails, 500 million LinkedIn
members, 180 million active Office 365 users and 800 million
Windows 10 devices, according to a Microsoft report. The company
trains its AI models using 420 billion interactions that take place on
Microsoft Office every month, the report showed.

“This is a real opportunity for

Microsoft on the Azure side of the
house.”
Brad Zelnick, managing director of software equity research at
Deutsche Bank

The company uses all of this data to identify patterns and interpret
and perform tasks in other applications. For instance, data from Bing
is used to provide stock information in Microsoft Excel, and LinkedIn
data is used for the Resume Builder tool in Word. Deutsche Bank
analyst Brad Zelnick says the company could combine this network of
data with OpenAI’s algorithms to automate the daily tasks of
knowledge workers.
“The real opportunity is not just in implementing the technology, but
who's going to implement it best, who's going to be able to train the
applications of this technology with the richest data set,” he says. “I
think when you consider the advantages as it relates to Azure, the
implementation and training of these algorithms require massive
amounts of computing, data analytics and data infrastructure. This is
a real opportunity for Microsoft on the Azure side of the house.”

After Google’s 2014 acquisition of artificial intelligence company

DeepMind, Google has also made parallel and similar headway in AI
research. For instance, Google’s LaMDA represented a breakthrough
in large language models, the technology that underlies ChatGPT,
and it also allows users to ask questions to a chatbot that can respond
in a human-sounding manner. Former Apple CEO and AI-based
enterprise software firm Zeta cofounder John Sculley says Google had
a clear opportunity to win the race in AI but has instead focused its
investments on its core products including Google Search and
YouTube.

“Google is in the advertising business. And it builds its AI capability

around processing massive amounts of data as it pertains to search. It
hasn’t gone into the productivity space with automation at the scale
that Microsoft intends to,” Sculley says.

May Habibi, the CEO of Writer AI, an AI content writing platform for
businesses and teams, says another reason why big tech companies
like Google may have refrained from rolling out generative AI on
their products like Docs and Slides could be due to the risks of data
governance, security and legal issues.

Although ChatGPT can produce answers in an authoritative and easy

to comprehend tone, the chatbot has already become infamous for
being inaccurate. Tech media company CNET secretly used ChatGPT
to write its articles and was later forced to issue corrections because
they contained multiple inaccuracies on basic concepts. If ChatGPT
renders similar inaccuracies within Word or PowerPoint, it could put
off customers from relying on it, Habibi says.

“I think the reason Google Docs and Gmail have limited themselves
to simple autocomplete isn't because [Google’s AI model] LaMDa
isn't capable of longer length content generation,” Habibi told Forbes.
“It's really because Google has shied away from releasing their
technology, knowing the kind of downsides of large language models
when it comes to the issue of plausible bullshit.”
Priya Vijayarajendran, who was the vice president of data and AI at
Microsoft from 2019 to 2022 and worked closely with OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman and his team, says OpenAI originally wanted to make
advanced AI models widely accessible and open source so that
everyone could take advantage of it. But while it started out as a
nonprofit, OpenAI has since shifted to a for-profit business model as
it partnered with Microsoft to commercialize its AI.

“From what I gathered from my colleagues and friends at Microsoft is

that they are on a mission to productize it to a larger benefit for the
rest of them. So the real proof in the pudding is who gets the product
out there into the market,” Vijayarajendran says. “I think Sam and
the team had a noble vision. And I hope that the integrity of the
vision stays in spite of Microsoft having a huge share.”