ChatGPT Fast FactsWhat is ChatGPT? A generative AI that can answer questions in natural-sounding language.
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The business world has embraced ChatGPT over the last year and found uses for the writing and image generation AI throughout many industries. This cheat sheet includes answers to the most common questions about ChatGPT and its competitors.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot product developed by OpenAI and built on the structure of GPT-4. GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer; this indicates it is a large language model that checks for the probability of what words might come next in sequence. A large language model is a deep learning algorithm — a type of transformer model in which a neural network learns context about any language pattern. That might be a spoken language or a computer programming language.
OpenAI continues to update ChatGPT with faster, more capable AI models. In September, the company showed its next-generation model o1, which is optimized for complex reasoning in math and science. While o1 actually takes more time to process information than GPT-4o does, that slow and steady approach can produce more complicated code or mathematical processes. OpenAI o1 is available in preview to ChatGPT Plus and Team users.
The model doesn’t “know” what it’s saying, but it does know what symbols (words) are likely to come after one another based on the data set it was trained on. The current generation of artificial intelligence chatbots, such as ChatGPT, its Google rival Bard, and others, don’t really make intelligently informed decisions. Instead, they’re the internet’s parrots, repeating words that are likely to be found next to one another in the course of natural speech.
The underlying math is all about probability. The companies that make and use them pitch them as productivity genies, creating text in a matter of seconds that would take a person hours or days to produce.
In ChatGPT’s case, that data set is a large portion of the internet. From there, humans give feedback on the AI’s output to confirm whether the words it uses sound natural.
The public version of ChatGPT can call on current events information as recent as January 2022. ChatGPT Plus can call on current events information as recent as April 2023.
In August 2023, OpenAI launched GPTBot, a web crawler meant to expand ChatGPT’s knowledge. The company provided technical details about GPTBot and ways to keep it from crawling a website.
SEE: OpenAI’s probability assessments were trained on Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputer. (TechRepublic)
Several organizations have built chatbots into some of their software features. Microsoft, which provides funding for OpenAI, rolled out ChatGPT in Bing search and in Microsoft 365. Salesforce has added ChatGPT to some of its CRM platforms in the form of the Einstein digital assistant.
Who made ChatGPT?
ChatGPT was built by OpenAI, a research laboratory with both nonprofit and for-profit branches. At the time of its founding in 2015, OpenAI received funding from Amazon Web Services, InfoSys, and YC Research, and investors including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Musk has since cut ties with the company, while Microsoft provided $10 billion in funding for OpenAI in 2023.
How much does ChatGPT cost?
The base version of ChatGPT can strike up a conversation with you for free.
For $20 per month, ChatGPT Plus gives subscribers priority access in individual instances, faster response times, and the chance to use new features and improvements first. For example, right now ChatGPT Plus subscribers will be running GPT-4, while anyone on the free tier will talk to GPT-3.5.
For developers and organizations who don’t already have a specific contract with OpenAI, there is a waitlist for access to the ChatGPT API.
In August 2023, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise, a subscription plan for business with more security enhancements and admin controls compared to the basic version. Organizations interested in pricing for ChatGPT Enterprise can contact OpenAI’s sales team. As of January 2024, 260 enterprise customers had signed up for ChatGPT Enterprise, according to Bloomberg.
In January 2024, OpenAI opened ChatGPT Team, a subscription that allows access to OpenAI’s larger models and a collaborative workspace. It costs $25/month per user when billed per year or $30/month per user billed monthly.
How to use ChatGPT
It’s easy to use ChatGPT. Just follow these steps:
- Visit https://chat.openai.com/.
- Sign up for an account with OpenAI, which involves fetching a confirmation code from your email, or use ChatGPT without logging in.
- Type in the prompt box, where it says “Message ChatGPT,” to get started.
- For the Plus version, you’ll see an Upgrade To Plus button on the left side of the home page if you log in.
OpenAI may use conversations with ChatGPT held without an account for AI training. There is a way to opt out of your conversations being used as training data if you are logged in: go to Settings and uncheck “Improve the model for everyone.”
For businesses, ChatGPT can write and debug code, as well as create reports, presentations, emails, and websites. In general, ChatGPT can draft the kind of prose you’d likely use for work (“Write an email accepting an invitation to speak at a cybersecurity conference.”). ChatGPT can answer questions (“What are similar books to [xyz]?”) as well. Microsoft showed off these features in its announcement that OpenAI is coming to Word and some other parts of the 365 business suite.
ChatGPT has historically not ‘remembered’ information from one conversation to another. However, starting on Feb. 13, free and Plus users can try out the experimental memory controls, which retain information about previous chats. Memory controls can be turned off by selecting Settings > Personalization > Memory, or by telling ChatGPT to forget.
ChatGPT Plus members can use a feature called custom instructions to make sure the AI remembers certain things about them. For example, it can remember if a specific user tends to want content for a business audience or, conversely, for third graders. Custom instructions is not available in the UK and EU.
ChatGPT app for iOS
On May 18, 2023, OpenAI announced the launch of the free ChatGPT app for iOS. The company stated the app syncs your history across devices and that it integrates with its open-source speech-recognition system Whisper. On the iOS app, OpenAI said ChatGPT Plus subscribers get exclusive access to GPT-4’s capabilities, early access to features, and faster response times.
OpenAI started this rollout in the U.S. As of May 24, 2023, it expanded to 11 more countries — Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and the UK, with more expected to follow.
ChatGPT app for Android
ChatGPT for Android dropped on July 25, 2023, for users in the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. Android users in those countries can download the app through the Google Play Store now. Additional countries gained access over the following week, OpenAI said.
Voice and image capabilities
On Nov. 21, 2023, ChatGPT Voice was released for all users. This feature allows users to ask questions out loud and for ChatGPT to reply in the same way.
Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise first reported new voice and image capabilities rolling out in late October.
ChatGPT users subscribed to the Plus and Enterprise tiers can use DALL-E 3 to generate and edit images inside of the ChatGPT chat window. As of Feb. 12, 2024, all images generated with DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT will include C2PA metadata, a watermarking standard that states the image was created by the AI models.
Desktop apps for Windows and iOS
OpenAI made a ChatGPT desktop app for Windows 10 and 11 available for all users on Nov. 14. The app, accessible via Alt+Space, opens a ChatGPT window with all the usual functions, including internet search and interpreting images.
A corresponding app for iOS is in beta release now and will work with the following developer-focused applications:
- VS Code.
- Xcode.
- Terminal.
- iTerm2.
The idea is for developers to be able to connect the ChatGPT app to their IDE or terminal to ask questions about the content. Currently open to Plus and Team users, OpenAI plans to open the iOS app beta to Enterprise and Edu users within a few weeks and let the ChatGPT app connect to more iOS apps soon.
Helpful ChatGPT prompts
Prompts are queries that instruct ChatGPT what information to provide; they can be simple questions, but slight wording changes may produce different results. Some helpful prompts provided by Open AI are:
- Summarize the meeting notes in a single paragraph. Then write a markdown list of the speakers and each of their key points. Finally, list the next steps or action items suggested by the speakers, if any.
- How do I add up a row of dollar amounts in Excel? I want to do this automatically for a whole sheet of rows, with all the totals ending up on the right in a column called “Total.”
OpenAI provides the following tips for getting clear, useful responses from large language models:
- Write clear instructions. You can specify whether you want the AI’s responses to be short or long, detailed or simple, or for a particular audience.
- Provide other texts for the AI to refer to.
- Ask for a “chain of thought,” which gives ChatGPT more time to puzzle out a correct answer.
- Feed ChatGPT the outputs of other tools, such as RAG or a code execution engine, to increase the accuracy of the responses.
ChatGPT updates and OpenAI API news
OpenAI continues to update ChatGPT and its other services with developer-focused changes.
OpenAI’s bug bounty program
OpenAI started a bug bounty program on April 12, 2023, offering between $200 and $20,000 to ethical hackers who find vulnerabilities in the code. More critical vulnerabilities net larger bounties.
OpenAI isn’t looking for solutions to problems with ChatGPT’s content (e.g., the known “hallucinations”); instead, the organization wants hackers to report authentication issues, data exposure, payments issues, security issues with the plugin creation system, and more. Details about the bug bounty program can be found on Bugcrowd.
OpenAI’s privacy update allows users to exclude themselves from training data
On April 25, 2023, OpenAI announced it added a Chat History & Training setting that lets users turn off their ChatGPT chat history, preventing future versions of OpenAI’s large language models from training on those conversations. To find this option, click on your account name, which will display as your email address. Select Settings > Data Controls > Chat History & Training.
As of now, if this setting is not selected, user data will be fed back into the AI to train it to produce more naturalistic and useful responses.
OpenAI filters out personally identifiable information from the training data, OpenAI told Bloomberg. As of April 2023, users can download a copy of their ChatGPT chats and see what training data they have produced. In ChatGPT Enterprise, users’ data is used to train other OpenAI products.
Web browsing and plugins
GPTPlus users gained access to a beta version of web browsing and Plugins on the week of May 12, 2023. The beta includes web browsing mode, in which ChatGPT will sometimes access the internet to pull in information about current events.
Secondly, the beta version of ChatGPT will call on third-party plugins at the appropriate times if the user enables them. Third-party plugins can be accessed in the Plugin Store under Plugins in the model switcher. This opens ChatGPT up to more than 70 third-party plugins.
June 2023 API and pricing updates
On June 13, 2023, OpenAI added function calling to the Chat Completions API; reduced the price of its embeddings model, which helps the model interpret tokens; and reduced the price of input tokens for GPT-3.5 -turbo, one of the subscription models for the GPT 3.5 model.
With function calling, developers can describe functions to GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 turbo and the AI will return a JSON object that can call those functions. This could be used to create chatbot tools that call external plugins, convert natural language into database queries or API calls, or extract structured data from text.
Other announcements from OpenAI’s June 13, 2023 blog post include:
- Updated and more steerable versions of GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo.
- New 16K context version of GPT-3.5-turbo compared to the standard 4K version.
- Applications using GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and GPT-4-32K will automatically be upgraded to new models on June 27.
Code interpreter
On July 6, 2023, OpenAI made ChatGPT’s code interpreter function available to all ChatGPT Plus users. The Code interpreter is an in-house plug-in with which ChatGPT can run code to analyze data, solve math problems, create charts, edit files, and similar tasks. It functions using a Python interpreter in a sandboxed, firewalled execution environment in a persistent session the length of the chat conversation, OpenAI said in their blog post.
Code interpreter is available in beta by taking the following steps in a ChatGPT Plus account:
- Click on your name.
- Select beta features from your settings.
- Toggle on the beta features you’d like to try.
GPTs
On Nov. 6, 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4 Turbo and GPTs, which are custom versions of ChatGPT that can be built for specific tasks, for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users. GPTs do not require any knowledge of coding to create; instead, users can have a natural language conversation with generative AI to create them. Developers can define custom actions for GPTs by making one or more APIs available to the GPT. Enterprise customers can share GPTs within their organizations.
OpenAI opened in January 2024 a marketplace for browsing and using GPTs.
As of January, GPTs can be used within the standard ChatGPT chat window. Users can type the @ symbol to choose a GPT.
Copyright Shield
On Nov. 6, 2023, OpenAI announced Copyright Shield. Copyright Shield is a guarantee that if someone files legal claims around copyright infringement against content created by users of ChatGPT Enterprise or OpenAI’s developer platform, OpenAI incur the costs.
April 2024 API fine-tuning updates
On April 4, 2024, OpenAI introduced new features for fine-tuning ChatGPT using the API. These new features include more checkpoints created during training, reducing the need for subsequent retraining, and more third-party integrations. Plus, assisted fine-tuning is now available in the Custom Model program.
Social criticisms and security issues of ChatGPT
With more and more organizations adopting generative AI, many questions arise. Will AI be able to fill jobs currently held by humans? What privacy and ethical concerns does it raise? These questions apply to both ChatGPT and its competitors, since any generative AI can perform similar tasks. Generative AI like ChatGPT can convincingly invent incorrect information, contributing to disinformation or confusion.
Will ChatGPT result in people losing jobs?
Whether ChatGPT will take jobs away from humans is difficult to predict. Goldman Sachs said in an April 2023 report that a quarter to a half of humans’ workloads could be automated with generative AI. The financial institution notes that doesn’t necessarily mean those jobs will disappear — instead, most will be “only partially exposed to automation” — and it may lead to up to a 7% increase in global GDP.
Roles that are repetitive or based on very specific rules are most likely to be able to be performed by AI, Steven Miller, professor emeritus of information systems at Singapore Management University, told CNBC.
ChatGPT could lead to new job roles being created, too. At the very least, people will be needed to prompt, train, and audit AI like ChatGPT. Most likely, we’ll see the kind of shuffle that comes with any major technological shift as some jobs change and others do not.
SEE: How ChatGPT could enhance jobs instead of replacing them (TechRepublic)
Some experts refer to the current wave of AI as similar to the early days of the internet. Technological limitations still exist, and some estimations about how many jobs would be lost through automation have proven exaggerated in the past. The IEEE points out that the AI industry will need to be aware of hardware limitations and costs. Companies may not find it practical to spend enough money on AI services in order to replace a large percentage of their workforce. Paying users of ChatGPT can make a maximum of 25 GPT-4 queries every three hours, IEEE pointed out.
In some jobs, the AI may remove the need for a first draft, MIT labor economics professor David Autor said in an interview with CBS MoneyWatch. A human will need to tweak the output and give in a unique angle or more varied wording, but ChatGPT could write the bare bones version of a speech or a blog post.
Ethical and privacy concerns about ChatGPT
ChatGPT opens up questions about the ethics of using written content created by the algorithm. Posts created by AI should be clearly marked as such, but what about more casual communication, such as emails? Business leaders should establish guidelines for when to be transparent about the use of ChatGPT or other AI at work.
OpenAI cautions that its products are not to be used for decisions in law enforcement or global politics. Privacy, which is perhaps a more pressing concern than global domination, led Italy to ban ChatGPT. OpenAI has since stated it wants to find a way to let ChatGPT work within the European Union’s strict privacy rules. The EU has since established legislation around the use of AI.
Perhaps inspired by science fiction about AI taking over the earth, some high-profile players in tech urge caution about giving AI too much free rein. On March 22, 2023, a petition and open letter signed by Elon Musk and many others urged companies to pause large AI development until more safeguards can be built in.
Some artists and writers have protested the use of ChatGPT for replicating their original styles, potentially devaluing their work or making fewer copies.
Security concerns around ChatGPT
ChatGPT can be used in malicious ways or have vulnerabilities. One potential security problem comes from people using generative AI like ChatGPT to draft business email compromise messages or other cyberattacks. According to BBC News, GPTs (the ChatGPT feature that helps users build AI apps) helped BBC News create a generative pre-trained transformer for writing phishing emails.
“The public version of ChatGPT refused to create most of the [malicious] content — but Crafty Emails [the app] did nearly everything asked of it, sometimes adding disclaimers saying scam techniques were unethical,” wrote Joe Tidy at BBC News.
IBM X-Force security researchers used ChatGPT to write phishing emails. However, the phishing emails written by humans for the same test were more successful.
Training data extracted with “poem” exploit
On Nov. 28, 2023, security researchers from Google DeepMind found that adversarial actors could extract training data, including personal information, from ChatGPT using a flaw based on extractable memorization. The paper, published as a PDF on arXiv, shows that the researchers could trick the chatbot into revealing its raw training data. One way to do so was to ask ChatGPT to repeat the word ‘poem’ forever. This would result in the chatbot eventually diverging from the task and generating random content, or, in some cases, generating the exact data the generative AI was trained on.
“The actual attack is kind of silly,” the researchers wrote, referring to the endless poem prompt. However, they warn that the consequences could be quite serious, with the attack circumventing ChatGPT’s privacy safeguards.
Other security concerns around ChatGPT
In December 2023, security researcher Johann Rehberger found a data exfiltration vulnerability in ChatGPT. OpenAI patched the vulnerability.
In January 2024, a ChatGPT user reported to ArsTechnica that another user’s private data appeared in his ChatGPT chat window. This was the result of a hack of the user’s account credentials, not a vulnerability in ChatGPT, OpenAI stated.
What are ChatGPT’s competitors?
ChatGPT’s primary competitors are:
Anthropic’s Claude
Claude runs on Anthropic’s Sonnet and Opus models, offering many of the same generation, summarization, and conversation features as ChatGPT at a similar price point. Claude is free to use or can be upgraded to a $20 per month subscription. Like ChatGPT, Claude can write code or respond to prompts about documents the user uploads. It can pull from public knowledge up to August 2023.
Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard)
ChatGPT’s main competitor is Gemini, Google’s AI generative AI chatbot. Bard is available in Google search and other apps and services. In comparison to ChatGPT, Bard focuses more on creating prose that sounds like a human could have spoken it naturally and less on being able to answer any question. Gemini is built on a proprietary large language model also called Gemini.
Meta AI with Llama 3
Meta’s most recent entry into the generative AI chatbot competition is Meta AI, built on the Llama 3 large language model. It can assist with searches, answer questions, and produce images. Meta AI is available across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger apps. You can also use Meta AI for free on a browser.
Microsoft’s Copilot
Copilot is a generative AI that works as a standalone chatbot or sits alongside Microsoft products, from the 365 productivity suite to specific services for cybersecurity, sales, and other business sectors. Microsoft Copilot is a cousin to ChatGPT in that both run on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model.
Perplexity AI’s chatbot
Perplexity AI sets itself apart by making sure its chatbot cites its sources. Perplexity AI points the user to relevant Google Search results, making its results more accurate than those of its competitors in some cases, especially when it comes to current events. For example, when we asked several AI chatbots who won the Super Bowl in 2023, Perplexity was the only one that provided the correct answer. However, Perplexity’s responses can be stiff or inconsistent if asked for creative content.
What about Apple?
Apple made its relatively late entry into the AI assistant race with Apple Intelligence, a suite of features for iOS 18. Apple Intelligence brings more natural conversations with Siri, photo editing, text summarization, and more to iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The AI runs on-device on proprietary LLMs, but some queries may be directed externally via a Private Cloud Compute — which connects Apple Intelligence to ChatGPT.
The future of ChatGPT in business
Will ChatGPT be common in online products in the future, or is it a technological innovation forever in search of a greater use case? Today, its “intelligence” is clearly still in the beginning stages, with OpenAI including disclaimers about inappropriate content or incorrect “hallucinations.” ChatGPT may put the words in a coherent order, but it won’t necessarily keep the facts straight.
GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 may also be getting worse at math. An August 2023 report from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley noted this “drift,” or gradual erosion of the ability to perform tasks like identifying prime numbers. Their theories as to why it’s happening include reduced ability to follow chain-of-thought (or, roughly, step-by-step) instructions.
In July 2023, two MIT economics graduate students conducted a study of 453 professionals. They found that people who used ChatGPT for writing tasks — such as producing press releases, short reports or analysis plans — took 40% less time to finish their tasks than a control group that was not encouraged to use the generative AI. These professionals were then scored by their peers. On average, they received grades 18% higher than those in the control group (who did not use AI). This provides some qualitative data on the effect ChatGPT could have on white-collar work.
“Participants with weaker skills benefited the most from ChatGPT, which carries policy implications for efforts to reduce productivity inequality through AI,” wrote the authors of the study, Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang.
Overall, Noy and Zhang maintained that widespread use of ChatGPT for writing tasks could have both positive and negative impacts in the workplace and the labor market.
Meanwhile, AI announcements that go viral can be good or bad news for investors. Microsoft’s stock price rose after the announcement of GPT-4, while Google’s stock dropped when Bard performed badly in a demonstration.
OpenAI saw visitor numbers to the ChatGPT website drop in June 2023 for the first time since its release in November 2022. According to Similarweb, worldwide unique visitors dropped 5.7% from May to June. Global desktop and mobile web traffic dropped 9.7%. ChatGPT still receives more worldwide visitors than Microsoft’s in-house AI at Bing.com. The shine may have worn off chat AI, although it’s too early to tell whether the business world will also start to cool on this trendy technology.
What’s next for ChatGPT?
For now, OpenAI says it isn’t training GPT-5, the likely successor to today’s model. In a talk at MIT reported on by The Verge, Altman pushed back against the open letter — an earlier draft of which had stated that a 5th generation was on the way; primarily, he criticized the letter’s lack of technical specificity.
“We are doing other things on top of GPT-4 that I think have all sorts of safety issues that are important to address and were totally left out of the letter,” Altman said.
He said no one should expect to see a GPT-5 rollout “for some time.” Instead, OpenAI seems to be concentrating on its OpenAI o1 technology.
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