All you need to know about ChatGPT

• Schools, corporate boardrooms and social media are abuzz with talk about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by AI startup OpenAI.
• The tool is capable of taking written inputs from users and producing human-like responses — from poetry in the style of William Shakespeare to advice on what to do for a child’s birthday party.
• It has also sparked a tense clash between Google and Microsoft, two of the world’s largest tech companies.

What is ChatGPT? I asked the buzzy artificial intelligence chatbot, which has ignited conversation in schools, corporate boardrooms and social media, to explain itself.

In its own description, ChatGPT is “an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) language model. It uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner.”

The tool is the talk of the business world. It has been mentioned on earnings calls by management from a range of companies including oil giants, banks — and even the industrial behemoth Caterpillar.

It has also sparked concerns over potential abuses. In classrooms, students have used ChatGPT to generate entire essays, while hackers have begun testing it to write malicious code.

So what is ChatGPT, exactly? Here’s a simple guide on all you need to know about the popular AI chatbot.

What is ChatGPT?