ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer[2]) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
ChatGPT was launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, and quickly garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge. Its uneven factual accuracy, however, was identified as a significant drawback.[3] Following the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI's valuation was estimated at US$29 billion.[4]
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, by San Francisco–based OpenAI, the creator of DALL·E 2 and Whisper AI. The service was launched as initially free to the public, with plans to monetize the service later.[26] By December 4, OpenAI estimated ChatGPT already had over one million users.[11] In January 2023, ChatGPT reached over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer application to date.[27] CNBC wrote on December 15, 2022, that the service "still goes down from time to time".[28] The service works best in English, but is also able to function in some other languages, to varying degrees of success.[15] Unlike some other recent high-profile advances in AI, as of December 2022, there is no sign of an official peer-reviewed technical paper about ChatGPT.[29]
According to OpenAI guest researcher Scott Aaronson, OpenAI is working on a tool to attempt to digitally watermark its text generation systems to combat bad actors using their services for academic plagiarism or spam.[30][31] The company says that this tool, called "AI classifier for indicating AI-written text",[32] will "likely yield a lot of false positives and negatives, sometimes with great confidence." An example cited in The Atlantic magazine showed that "when given the first lines of the Book of Genesis, the software concluded that it was likely to be AI-generated."[33]
The New York Times reported in December 2022 that it has been "rumored" that the next version of the AI, GPT-4, will be launched sometime in 2023.[2] In February 2023, OpenAI began accepting registrations from United States customers for a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, to cost $20 a month.[34] OpenAI is planning to release a ChatGPT Professional Plan that costs $42 per month, and the free plan is available when demand is low.
ChatGPT suffers from multiple limitations. OpenAI acknowledged that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers".[7] This behavior is common to large language models and is called artificial intelligence hallucination.[20] The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, otherwise known as Goodhart's law.[21] ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events that occurred after 2021. According to the BBC, as of December 2022, ChatGPT is not allowed to "express political opinions or engage in political activism".[22] Yet, research suggests that ChatGPT exhibits a pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation when prompted to take a stance on political statements from two established voting advice applications.[23] In training ChatGPT, human reviewers preferred longer answers, irrespective of actual comprehension or factual content.[7] Training data also suffers from algorithmic bias, which may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people. In one instance, ChatGPT generated a rap indicating that women and scientists of color were inferior to white and male scientists.[24][25]