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Another one of ChatGPT’s strengths is its flexibility. This streamlined interface has allowed people of all ages and backgrounds to instantly engage with it. While ChatGPT is underpinned by complex technology, its visual interface is incredibly intuitive: you simply enter text into a text box, just like you would on Google. OpenAI, meanwhile, chose to rush their product to market this fall in the face of potential looming competition, according to the New York Times. Other companies like Google held theirs back due to the unpredictability of this new technology and the potential harms it could cause, like the spreading of misinformation or hate speech.
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“The technology wasn’t putting forth any sort of fundamental breakthroughs.”īut ChatGPT was the first major project to roll out such an AI for the public to use, play with, and break. “Most of us are pretty surprised” about the explosive popularity of ChatGPT, admits Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at the AI company Hugging Face. Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, recently argued that ChatGPT was “not particularly innovative” and relied largely on Google’s Transformer neural net technology unveiled in 2017. This technology has existed for several years. Whereas many chatbots only know how to respond to certain keywords or triggers, ChatGPT can respond to complex questions and spit out comprehensive, essay-length answers on virtually any topic.ĬhatGPT is able to do this by running the Internet’s vast amounts of data through powerful neural networks: software loosely designed on neurons in the human brain. Known as a generative AI, it responds to virtually any prompt you give it with startling speed and clarity. ChatGPT is a chatbot created by the San Francisco company OpenAI.
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