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The business world has embraced ChatGPT over the last year, trying to find uses for the writing and image generation AI throughout many different industries. This cheat sheet includes answers to the most common questions about ChatGPT and its competitors.
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.
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 OpenAI launched a GPTBot, a web crawler meant to expand ChatGPT’s knowledge. Technical details and ways to keep GPTBot from crawling a website you run can both be found here.
SEE: OpenAI’s probability assessments were trained on Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputer. (TechRepublic)
Several organizations have built this ability to answer questions into some of their software features too. 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.
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.
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 which 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.
It’s easy to use the free version of ChatGPT. You may need to sign up for an account with OpenAI, which involves fetching a confirmation code from your email. From there, click through and provide your name and phone number.
OpenAI will warn you that the free version of ChatGPT is “a free research preview.” For the Plus version, you’ll see an “upgrade to Plus” button on the left side of the home page.
As of April 1, OpenAI started rolling out access to ChatGPT without an account.
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: go to Settings and uncheck “Improve the model for everyone.”
New signups or account upgrades for ChatGPT Plus were paused on Nov. 14, 2023 and reinstated on Dec. 13, 2023. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “thanks for your patience while we found more gpus.”
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 a specific user tends to want content for a business audience, or, conversely, for third graders. It is not available in the UK and EU.
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 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.
ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise subscribers can use ChatGPT to answer questions using the Bing search engine. Browsing was brought out of beta on October 17, 2023.
To access Bing in ChatGPT, subscribing customers can choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4. OpenAI expects to expand internet browsing to all users at a later date.
Browse with Bing was disabled on July 3, 2023 out of “an abundance of caution,” OpenAI wrote, and reinstated in beta on Sept. 27 of the same year. OpenAI has since added “updates include following robots.txt and identifying user agents so sites can control how ChatGPT interacts with them.”
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.
OpenAI continues to update ChatGPT and its other services with developer-focused changes.
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.
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.
On June 13, 2023, OpenAI added function calling to the Chat Completions API; reduced the price of their 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 which 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:
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:
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.
Whether ChatGPT will take jobs away from humans is impossible to predict. Goldman Sachs says in an April 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 points 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.
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.
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.
On April 25, 2023, OpenAI announced it has 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 on producing 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.
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 will costs incurred.
Another potential 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.
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.
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.
ChatGPT’s primary competitors are or could be Google’s Bard, Baidu’s Ernie, DeepMind’s Sparrow and Meta’s BlenderBot.
ChatGPT’s main competitor is Bard, 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. Bard is built on Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
The Chinese search engine Baidu plans to add a chatbot called Ernie. Baidu announced the upcoming change on March 16, 2023, at which point the initial showing disappointed investors.
OpenAI competes with DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research laboratory owned by Alphabet. The two organizations are significantly different in terms of their aims. DeepMind focuses more on research and has not yet come out with a public-facing chatbot. DeepMind does have Sparrow, a chatbot designed specifically to help AI communicate in a way that is “helpful, correct and harmless.” DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis told The Independent in January that DeepMind may release a private beta version of Sparrow later in 2023.
Meta released BlenderBot in August 2022. The prototype BlenderBot from the company behind Facebook focuses on being able to chat, providing short, conversational replies rather than full paragraphs.
Meta also has Llama 2, a foundational model competitive with the GPT-4 engine behind ChatGPT.
Claude 2 is a generative AI assistant released in July. Anthropic describes it as “a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language.”
Elon Musk’s AI company X.ai, which includes developers with prior experience at OpenAI and DeepMind among other AI companies, released a chatbot called Grok in November. Grok was trained on the X social media platform (formerly Twitter) and “is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” X.ai wrote on Nov. 4.
According to The New York Times, Apple is working on leveraging the tech it has, especially Siri, to create a ChatGPT rival. More information about what the final product might look like is thin on the ground for now. At a Feb. 1 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said generative AI features may appear in Apple phones later in 2024, likely with iOS 18.
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.
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.”
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