Barely a few months after its release, ChatGPT has been making waves on the internet since OpenAI launched it in November 2022. From being an unknown app, it took only one week to reach 1 million users, making it the fastest-growing web app in history. Have you wondered how ChatGPT works? What’s in ChatGPT that has attracted millions of users, including Filipinos? Would this advanced technology improve our search, discovery, and doing things? How does this app, which an unknown startup developed, has been challenging tech giants like Google and is on course to revolutionize how Filipinos and the rest of the world live and work? This article is LeapOut’s response to the myth and mystery surrounding ChatGPT and how we, as a digital marketing company, use this disruptive technology to simplify our tasks and boost our productivity. Person typing a prompt on ChatGPT | Photo from Freepik What is ChatGPT? Let us hear the answer straight from ChatGPT’s “mouth.” Below is the screenshot of the actual response I got: To make sense of this definition from a non-techy standpoint, let us dissect what “GPT” means from ChatGPT. What does GPT stand for in ChatGPT? GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a techy way of saying it is a chatbot that can answer any query. According to the app, GPT is “based on a transformer architecture and is pre-trained on large amounts of text data to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs.” Suppose you’re not into machine learning or AI terminologies and want to know what GPT means in laypeople’s terms. In that case, it is a chatbot with the capacity to generate responses and content the way a human does (generative) by “learning” from a considerable amount of existing data (2021 and earlier, in the case of ChatGPT) (pre-trained) using a machine learning methodology that mimics how a human brain process language, or as OpenAI put it in its FAQs about the app, maximizes “the similarity between outputs and the dataset the models were trained on” (transformer). Taken as a whole, ChatGPT is an AI that can understand queries or prompts language after undergoing training for several years and then generating a response in text content from the pool of data it has been trained on. The AI chatbot’s incredible power In just a few weeks after ChatGPT’s launch, tech giant Google, its apparent closest competitor, sounded code red, perhaps the most serious in its more than 20 years of dominance in online search. In just a few weeks, Google introduced Bard, its version of a generative AI bot. Other tech companies followed suit after witnessing the exponential rise of OpenAI’s launch of their version of artificial intelligence chatbots. From Google, other industry leaders, including social media king Meta/Facebook, Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, and Firefox creator Mozilla, joined the AI bandwagon. What is the Use of ChatGPT? What’s unique about ChatGPT, aside from being free of charge, is its power to generate “fresh” text content. Its primary purpose is to help users by generating responses to their queries in ordinary human language. It can also perform various natural language processing tasks, including translation, summarization, sentiment analysis, and language understanding. Personally, as a web content specialist and a curious student of various fields, I tried using this advanced AI chatbot to do the following: Short to long-form content ChatGPT is a boon for people struggling to write short text such as slogans, captions for social media, and meta descriptions for blog posts. Language translation This powerful app can also act as a personal translator. I tried asking it to translate a simple sentence, “I think it will rain this afternoon.” into Chinese. Here is the result: As a person who knows elementary to intermediate Chinese, its translation is accurate considering the nuances in the language. Creative writing It can also compose more creative text like marketing copies and taglines besides writing articles, blog posts, and other types of text content. It can also come up with lyrics and poems. Curious, I asked or prompted ChatGPT to write a sonnet about a beloved dog. The AI chatbot came up with this impressive result: Even though the composition is far from Shakespeare’s or Milton’s masterpiece, the AI wrote a decent poem that even an average person has difficulty writing. Coding With the correct prompts, programmers can use the app to help them with coding tasks in most programming languages. It has been trained to generate web pages and apps. Data professionals can also use this to crunch numbers and easily create visualizations. How LeapOut uses ChatGPT? In line with the company’s value of utilizing tech to provide the best service to clients, LeapOut has been using the latest online tools, including AI applications. Even before ChatGPT, the company’s content team has been using another AI app to facilitate our writing and content creation tasks. The team has used it alongside other online tools just days after OpenAI announced its public release of ChatGPT. Aside from research, we also use it for creating outlines for articles and blog posts. The app is also helpful in generating ideas for our Social Media team’s copy ideation. Its responses still need improvement, so we must conduct additional research to ensure accuracy and avoid plagiarism. Our SEO team also takes advantage of the AI chatbot’s capability as a companion to Semrush and other tools. It helps choose the best keywords to target in our campaigns and content requirements. When was ChatGPT released? OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company, officially launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. When prompted about its history, the AI chatbot came out with this output: Technology leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, Elon MZusk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, joined hands in developing advanced artificial intelligence they claimed to benefit humanity. Its development was led by a team of AI researchers and engineers who used state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to train me on massive data. The training
