ChatGPT is a chatBot powered with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate human-like conversations. It was built based on the Large Language Modol (LLM) architecture named GPT-3.5 which is trained with an incredibly huge amount of language data over languages including programming languages. This allows it to be a powerful tool for various applications relevant to languages, such as writing emails, blogs, and code assistance.

How does ChatGPT work?

When a user interacts with ChatGPT, the AI model analyzes the text questions and generates a response based on its “understanding” of the language. It does this by using a variety of techniques, including text classification, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and language modeling.

Figure 1: Example of text segmentation

ChatGPT’s fundamental component is a large language model named GPT-3.5 which has been trained on a large amount of language data to be able to “understand” the languages. This GPT-3.5 model understands the languages by capturing the probabilities of text sequence in seen data. To do so, the GPT model segments the text sequence into tokens which can be words, characters, or morphs (Figure 1). A morph is a word segment (for e.g: ‘minu’, ‘lla’) that represents one morpheme, the smallest unit of language that has meaning. With the captured probabilities, the GPT model is able to predict the next token of the sequence in such a way that the new sequence should be reasonably human-like. 

The pre-trained GPT-3.5 model is enhanced to be able to understand the questions from users. It has been trained with a huge amount of supervisory data of question patterns and desired answer patterns. The architecture of ChatGPT also has a supervisory-trained model to assess the quality of output of the enhanced GPT model to the questions. This reward model is used as a part of reinforcement learning to support ChatGPT self-improvement to be able to understand more question patterns.

Applications of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is based on LLM; therefore, its basic ability is to generate human-like conversations. This ability has a wide range of potential applications in different fields, such as:

  • customer service (Intelligent chatBot to answer customers quickly and accurately), 
  • writing assistance (users with some basic prompts can ask ChatGPT to write the draft content of their blogs, scripts, grammar errors detection, etc),
  • language translation.

Overall, ChatGPT’s potential applications are vast and varied, and as AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative ways that it can be used.

Pros and cons of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an effective tool to support automating certain tasks to save time and resources for businesses. ChatGPT is available 24/7 and able to handle a large volume of inquiries or tasks simultaneously, allowing businesses to scale up without increasing the head count. 

ChatGPT does not really understand languages, which does not allow it to generate original ideas or understand complex and abstract concepts. This limited understanding and creativity could lead to inaccurate responses and plagiarism. ChatGPT does not have access to the internet; therefore, it only knows information up to 2021. ChatGPT may have access to sensitive information, and it also does not tell users the sources of the information, which is a potential violation of the EU’s GDPR. 

Overall, ChatGPT is a useful tool for automating manual, repetitive tasks requiring minimal creativity and thinking. However, it is not “smart” enough to replace humans in roles that require characteristics of emotions, empathy, creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. Users also need to be self-aware of its potential data privacy violations.

Conclusions

ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool that has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about the language AI. With its ability to generate natural, human-like conversations, it can be used in a dynamic range of applications, from customer service to writing assistance. As AI technology continues to advance, it is exciting to think about the possibilities that ChatGPT and other language models can reach  in the future.

Author’s bio

A Doctoral researcher and Data scientist with passion about Natural Language Processing in particular and Machine learning in general.