How ChatGPT Works: A Guide to Understanding AI

By
Rashi Jaitly
min read
Updated
September 19, 2023
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Introduction

Remember when it was just a theory that technology would be able to accomplish nearly everything that humans do?

Well, ChatGPT just proved that can happen.

If you want a code, ChatGPT will write it for you. If you want to travel, ChatGPT will give you the itinerary. If you want to chat with Shakespeare, ChatGPT software will help you.

ChatGPT is trained on a massive amount of data from the internet, it can generate responses through user prompts. No human brain can compare to the amount of information that ChatGPT stores.

So what exactly is ChatGPT, how does it work and what are its applications? Keep reading down to find out.

11 Best ChatGPT Chrome Extensions to Try in 2023

TL;DR:

  • ChatGPT is an AI language model that uses NLP to create human-like conversations.
  • ChatGPT is trained on massive amounts of data and has an expansive knowledge base.
  • ChatGPT can be used for various language generation tasks and has applications in marketing, business operations, customer service, and education.
  • It does have limitations like incorrect information, lack of creativity, and content sounding too similar.

What is ChatGPT?

Asking ChatGPT what is ChatGPT
(Source: ChatGPT)

ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It debuted in December 2022 and surpassed 100 million active users in January.

ChatGPT is a chat-based tool that uses Natural Learning Processing (NLP) to create human-like conversations. It is a variant of the latest GPT-3 model trained on massive amounts of data.

The key features of ChatGPT are:

  • ChatGPT can understand human language thanks to its transformer model training infrastructure.
  • ChatGPT can retain context from previous prompts and provide more relevant responses.
  • ChatGPT has an expansive knowledge base.
  • ChatGPT's architecture and training model allows it to scale and fine-tune specific tasks for unique use cases.
  • ChatGPT is large-scale. It has been trained on over 175 billion parameters, making it one of the largest models.
  • ChatGPT responds in real time, just like a chatbot you will find on a website.

This AI tool has been adjusted for various language generation tasks, like language translation, summarization, text completion, answering questions, and even imitating human speech.

🎓 Go deeper: What is ChatGPT? Everything You Need to Know

How does ChatGPT work?

The most recent generation of artificial intelligence uses LLM (Large Language Models). This technology is deeply trained to understand and generate text in a human-like fashion. ChatGPT combines LLM with an interaction layer that uses unsupervised learning to predict outcomes.

Unlike traditional NLP (Natural Language Processing) models that rely on specific rules and manually labeled data, ChatGPT uses a neural network architecture to generate responses. This means it generates responses even without having to feed the correct responses.

GPT's grammar and capabilities from the number of occurrences/patterns of words on the internet
(Source: PreScouter)

ChatGPT is built on GPT, one of the largest commercially available transformer models. The term GPT stands for:

  • Generative: generates text. The goal is to predict what word will come next in the sentence.
  • Pre-trained: Trained on a large set of data to find predictions and patterns.
  • Transformer: The algorithm that the model uses. It specializes in processing long texts of data, paying attention to the information and understanding how the words are used in the sentence.

How is ChatGPT trained?

ChatGPT was trained using Constitutional AI, a technique developed by Anthropic. This approach focuses on helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty using natural language feedback.

To make it behave like a chatbot, the GPT model was trained on 10,000+ example chat conversations.

For further training, AI trainers have conversations and grade their output. The continuous implementation of feedback trained the model to be the current version of ChatGPT.

Applications of ChatGPT

According to Pew research, 58% of people have heard of ChatGPT, but only a few have tried it themselves (14%). So, If you're one of the 86% who hasn't used ChatGPT yet, these are some of its top applications.

1. Build applications

Not a developer but want to build an application without writing code? ChatGPT is your solution. ChatGPT can help you understand your customer's needs, features required in the app, color scheme, fonts, and even content. You can then use this information to write detailed prompts and create an entire app using ChatGPT.

‎2. Write landing pages

You can use ChatGPT to write a website from scratch or to explore ideas for web layouts and writing for different sections. You'll need to integrate ChatGPT into your landing page to enable chat functionality.

You can either make API calls to the OpenAI API to interact with ChatGPT or use existing libraries or frameworks that provide an interface for ChatGPT, making it easier to integrate.  

‎3. Replicate writing style

(Source: Nat Eliason)

At some point, we want to replicate the writing style, and ChatGPT lets you do it. You can use ChatGPT to rewrite content in a specific tone, demographic, or brand style.

ChatGPT can also be used to pull in different authors as coaches to refine different parts of your writing.

4. Create quick outlines

‎‎‎According to the latest Aira report, marketers typically invest more than 100 hours per month in content creation tasks such as drafting outlines, generating blog posts and developing statements of work (SOWs) for writers.

With AI tools like ChatGPT, writers can significantly reduce the time spent on these activities and focus on creativity.

5. Generate unlimited prompts

‎‎ChatGPT works on prompts, but writing them is complex. However, ChatGPT solves that problem by acting as a prompt professional. You can generate unlimited prompts and easily capitalize on ChatGPT's knowledge.

💡Discover the Versatility of ChatGPT: A Guide to Use Cases

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How are industries adopting ChatGPT?

Companies are adopting AI to reinvent the way work is done. According to Accenture, nearly 60% of companies plan to use ChatGPT for learning purposes, and more than half are creating pilot cases in 2023. Over 40% want to make a significant investment in ChatGPT.

(Source: Accenture)

Let's look at some of the top ChatGPT use cases.

1. Marketing and sales

According to Business Insider, the top benefits of using AI for marketers are time savings, writing better content and successfully producing clear text. In addition, most (83.4%) of marketers believe they will use AI to generate content in the next three years.

ChatGPT can be used for:

  • Content creation: ChatGPT can be used to create high-quality personalized content that aligns with the interests of your target audience. Marketers can search blog topics, find appropriate keywords, create drafts, or write social media posts.
  • Audience research: ChatGPT can be used to analyze customer data such as social media interactions, search queries and past purchases to identify patterns in customer behavior.
  • Product description: Marketers can use ChatGPT to provide potential customers with information related to the features, benefits and value of the product.

There are a number of other ways that marketers can use ChatGPT, like creating customer surveys, analyzing customer feedback, writing SEO-optimized titles, creating product user guides, understanding customer search intent and more.

2. Business operations

A McKinsey report shows that 60% of all occupations have at least 30% of technically automatable activities.

Here are a few ways you can incorporate ChatGPT in business operations:

  • Personal assistant for managers: ChatGPT can act as your personal assistant with a few prompts. You can use it to develop project timelines, summarize meeting scripts, send tasks, or set appointments.
  • Data analysis: Managers can use ChatGPT to request a statistical analysis of any data or a comparison of two or more sets of data. Its machine learning algorithms examine the data and provide insight based on the instruction prompts.
  • Practice sales call with a role play: Sales representatives can use ChatGPT to hone their sales skills. ChatGPT can pretend to be their potential customers, and you have to role-play into selling your product.

A big chunk of your daily tasks can be automated by ChatGPT, including sending personalized emails, creating presentations, generating customer reports, translating and many others.

3. Customer service

LLM models like ChatGPT have made it possible for small to medium-sized businesses to provide the same quality of support as big companies.

Here's how you can use ChatGPT in customer service:

  • Chat conversations: ChatGPT gives customer replies faster regardless of any channels, such as email, product reviews, or social media. A service agent can ask ChatGPT to quickly formulate responses to complaints and reviews.
  • Customer-facing chatbot: OpenAI offers an API for GPT-4 LLM that businesses can use to train the model on its knowledge base. You can then use these trained models in your customer-service chatbots to offer human-like interactions and answer specific questions.
  • Translate customer queries: For organizations that serve customers around the world can use ChatGPT to translate content into over 50 different languages.

You can also conduct sentiment analysis, write personalized responses, troubleshoot ideas, create a self-service portal, or even provide voice recognition to interpret customers' spoken queries.

4. Education

There have been doubts about using ChatGPT for education, some positive and some negative. However, research shows that 8 in 10 teachers approve of their students using ChatGPT. In fact, 84% of teachers who approve of ChatGPT spent time teaching students how to use it. ChatGPT can help students solve problems quicker and better meet their learning needs when used ethically.

There are several use cases for ChatGPT used by students and teachers:

  • Personalized learning: ChatGPT acts as a student's personal tutor by answering questions, explaining complex concepts and offering interactive learning experiences.
  • Writing support: ChatGPT can serve as a writing assistant by offering feedback on students' written work, suggesting improvements and providing grammar and style suggestions.
  • Study aid: ChatGPT can generate study materials such as flashcards, practice quizzes and summaries of course materials for teachers.

Teachers and students can use ChatGPT for research, language learning, personalized guidance and much more.

🎓 AI in Education: How to Revolutionize Learning

Generative AI like ChatGPT has the potential to transform work across industries like banking, insurance, software, capital markets, and many others. At least 40% of working hours across industries will be impacted by Large Language Models (LLMs)

Limitations of ChatGPT

ChatGPT can be anything but perfect. Here are some of its top limitations.

1. Incorrect information

ChatGPT is trained on data up to 2021, so any information or events that occurred after that date may only be known to the model if they have been updated through a separate process.

Fact-checking is recommended because all sources, both humans and machines, can make mistakes.

2. Lack of creativity

The main problem with AI-generated content is that it's forgettable.

Great content requires more than just words on a page. It is a cohesion of purpose, user experience and brand value.

3. Content sounds too similar

When you start using ChatGPT, the responses sound astounding. However, as you dive deeper or repeat those prompts a thousand times, you will see that the content soon becomes dry and tiring.

Another risk is a lack of copyright protection. You can't fully trust ChatGPT's content to be unique.

So, what's next?

Many applications have already integrated ChatGPT to automate processes and provide advanced capabilities to their users.

And one such app is Scribe. So, are you looking to improve your team's productivity and achieve your goals? Experience the benefits of ChatGPT-powered AI solutions with Scribe's process transformation software.

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