COVER FEATURE
WHY YOU MUST USE ChatGPT
Forget gimmicky and overpriced AI, and try the brilliant free tool that will genuinely improve your life. Robert Irvine explains everything you need to know about ChatGPT
Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has become inescapable, with virtually every big tech company dabbling in the technology. In many cases, such as Copilot in Windows, AI Overviews in Google Search and shopping assistant Rufus in Amazon’s mobile app, AI features have been foisted on us whether we want them or not, causing annoyance rather than amazement at their capabilities.
These heavy-handed tactics make the success of ChatGPT all the more remarkable. With over 300 million weekly users (see www.snipca.com/53466), it’s by far the most popular AI tool you can choose to use, which means you can discover its many benefits for yourself.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Get started with ChatGPT by mastering its main options
• Search the web using ChatGPT to find accurate and up-to-date information
• Analyse the content of documents, web pages and photos
• Create original text and images entering precise commands
• Use the Memory feature to improve ChatGPT’s advice
• Talk aloud to ChatGPT like you’re chatting to a friend
• Stop ChatGPT using your data for training purposes
Despite the huge uptake, ChatGPT still has an undeserved reputation for being aimed at tech boffins; as one article asked: is it “just a new toy for nerds?” (www.snipca.com/53468). That couldn’t be further from the truth, because not only is ChatGPT very easy to use, but it’s also now free for – and intended for – everyone to enjoy.
In this feature, we reveal the secret benefits of ChatGPT that go beyond the well-known purposes of generating, summarising and rewriting text content. We explain how the AI assistant works, how to improve your interactions to get the best results and all the brilliant and surprising ways ChatGPT can improve your life.
YOUR CHATGPT QUESTIONS ANSWERED
OpenAI kickstarted the AI revolution when it launched ChatGPT in November 2022
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence chatbot, developed by the American AI-research company OpenAI (www. snipca.com/53434). It’s designed to interact with users through natural language, providing answers and assistance on a wide variety of topics.
The GPT in its name stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which are the type of large language models (LLMs) used by the chatbot. The ‘generative’ means ChatGPT can create new content based on existing data, while the ‘transformer’ neural network enables it to learn context and meaning by tracking the relationships between sequential data – such as words in a sentence.
When ChatGPT publicly launched on 30 November 2022 (see screenshot above), it was based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model. This was trained on 570GB of text data from the internet, including websites, books and academic papers, amounting to more than 300 billion words. It’s since rapidly evolved to use more sophisticated AI models that significantly expand its capabilities.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT’s main objective is to predict the next word in a sentence, based on what typically happened in the text data it’s been trained on – like a super-advanced autocorrect. When you enter a question or prompt into ChatGPT, the chatbot uses its LLM to produce a response based on the information you’ve given and how that fits into its vast amount of training data.
ChatGPT uses a combination of deep learning algorithms, natural-language processing and generative pre-training to provide friendly, accurate and humanlike responses to text questions. The fact it can also generate stories, essays, letters and much more – as we’ll explain – has only added to its appeal and popularity (and controversy, especially in areas such as education and copyright law).
OpenAI’s new video-generation tool Sora isn’t available yet in the UK
The latest version of ChatGPT uses OpenAI’s o1 model, which has been trained to generate long ‘chains of thought’ and perform even more complex tasks, such as solving science and maths problems (see www.snipca. com/53436).
Can ChatGPT generate images and videos?
Yes and no. ChatGPT uses OpenAI’s image-generation model Dall-E3 to create pictures from your text prompts. It can also analyse images you upload or paste into its message box to identify their content.
Currently, ChatGPT can’t directly create videos. In December, OpenAI launched a new video-generation model called Sora (www.snipca.com/53437), which turns text and images into realistic videos. This is available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers as a standalone tool (rather than being integrated with the chatbot), but not yet in the UK or EU (see screenshot below).