OpenAI is making headlines again with its latest viral use of artificial intelligence. But what is ChatGPT and how does it work?

For years, there has been worldwide fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impending takeover of the world… who knew that it would start with the world of art and literature.

After months of dominating the internet with its AI image generator Dall-E 2, OpenAI has continued to be all over everyone’s social media feeds thanks to ChatGPT – a chatbot made using the company’s technology GPT-3.

It’s not exactly the catchiest name and could easily be the title of a random computer component or vague legal reference, but GPT-3 is actually the internet’s best-known language processing AI model.

Since its release, it has been banned in schools, utilised by Microsoft to revolutionise Bing, completed legal tests, wrote essays and done just about everything else in-between.

Now, the company has also introduced a pay-to-use version called ChatGPT Pro. This offers users a host of added benefits for $20 (£16) a month including priority access and faster load times.

So what is ChatGPT? What does it do? And is this really the future of AI? We’ve answered these questions and more down below.

What is GPT-3 and ChatGPT?

Chat GPT is defined as a generative language model. However in practice it is understood as an artificial intelligence chat that has been trained and designed to hold natural conversations. Chat GPT belongs to the research company OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Wojciech Zaremba.

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text and has a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots. It is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

In less corporate terms, GPT-3 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

ChatGPT is a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from. It’s not omniscient or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative. A few days after its launch, more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT.