Is ChatGPT as powerful as they say it is?

OpenAI's latest release, #chatgpt has almost everyone going bunkers! And for good reason. The tool is phenomenal to put it in the simplest of words. If you haven't been following the news there's been an uproar as well as applause from several industries at ChatGPT's presence on the internet. No matter how you feel about ChatGPT, everyone agrees it is state-of-art software

Imagine going to google with your symptoms and not reading that you have cancer and are about to die! Rather, you get a step-by-step appraisal of what could be wrong. Followed by six bullet points about what you can do to get rid of your symptoms. And a closing paragraph urging you to stay hydrated while wishing you well. Well, ChatGPT is capable of that and a lot more. I have been having a field day having it tell me jokes, short stories, and hard facts about science and even giving me advice on outlining this particular write-up!

I asked ChatGPT to tell me about itself and here is what it wrote-

“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI that has gained attention for its ability to generate human-like text. It is trained on a massive dataset of internet text, making it capable of understanding and responding to a wide range of topics and questions.?Additionally, it is designed to be easy to use, making it accessible to a wide range of developers and researchers. This combination of capabilities and ease of use has led to it being used in a variety of applications, such as chatbots and language translation, which in turn has generated a lot of interest and buzz in the field of natural language processing”.

Now how is that for a killer introduction? If that were a job interview it will probably get the job! Of course, its capabilities are scary. With ChatGPt writing long essays in just a couple of seconds, how can an educator tell their student actually write the essays they submit? of course they are worried! Content writers and technical writers have been shaken to the core. They not only have to compete against humans to safeguard their jobs but against AI. Customer service representatives are concerned. This new chatbot is far too many steps ahead of them in answering inquiries. Its speed and understanding of complex matters make it even more powerful with its wide range of applications. Plus it is ethical and morally upright. It will not tell you how to bully or commit crimes.

Are these concerns justified? Maybe, ChatGPTs architecture is groundbreaking

One of the reasons why ChatGPT stands out from its predecessors is its superior architecture. Unlike the latter responding to queries with canned answers, ChatGPT has several models which although limited to language, give it a wide range of understanding of words and sentences.?

It is composed of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder comprises of multiple self-attention fully connected layers that read and encode the input text. The same goes for the decoder, however, it generates the output text.?Its internal architecture combines deep learning techniques, machine learning algorithms and attention to memory to generate relevant responses.?

With its Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, ChatGPT is able to generate its own output for any question or query. This model contains 175 billion parameters of text in the form of articles, books or news items from the internet. Based on the magnitude of its data, it is capable of predicting sentence flow and responding contextually, coherently and fluently.

The transformer technology embedded does this by analysing the relationship between sentences. Another interesting detail in its architecture is the use of an attention mechanism. This model focuses on specific parts of the input text helping it generate responses particularly relevant to the previous conversation. The model weighs the importance of different parts of the input text to make predictions allowing the model to handle longer sequences better.

ChatGPT's Limitations

In spite of this leap forward in technological development, ChatGPT does have its limitations which make it impossible for it to replace humans in certain industries. A lot of reviews have remarked on how boastful the tool is and I could not agree more.?

It sometimes gives out inaccurate information in plain convincing language. So much so that if you do not know, you would have no reason to doubt whether or not the information it gives you are facts or not. For instance, I asked it for the recipe for a traditional Cameroonian dish and in less than 30 seconds it was back with a long write-up of utter nonsense! Be critical of the information it gives you and do your due diligence.?

The great news about ChatGPT as a tool

If you are working on a piece of writing content, ChatGPT can reduce your research time easily by more than 50%. it really does serve almost every industry. It is a great compliment to google for the first process for every research process and studying any topic. The usual google route has downsides to it. Most of the articles that pop up in a search are written from a marketing perspective. They focus on each topic as it pertains to their industries resulting in some level of bias.

Moreover, you would rarely get beginner-level information from google. Or you may have to filter through a bunch to figure out which works best for your topic. ChatGPT, contrary to this does a fantastic job at filtering out the important pieces. It goes through all articles, through all the technical content, stays unbiased and gives you the bits and pieces of what you need for a better understanding of your topic.

Secondly, ChatGPT is great at coming up with structure and outline. As I mentioned, I struggled with a strategy for this article. So I said let me ask ChatGPT, and I'll like to think she did a great job won't you agree?

Lastly, for those in the technical writing industry, it is great at maintaining tone, voice and consistency across documentation. A renowned technical writer holds that it may not follow all technical writing best practices, but it gives it a better tone. It can also assist in any discovery process by analysing huge amounts of scientific literature. Helping in designing experiments and potential leads and targets.?

By and large, ChatGPt is a revolutionary AI that will continue to change the landscape of various industries and our lives in general. As powerful as it may be as of yet, it does have its limitations. For those worried about their jobs, I'd say,?instead of competing with it, work with it. But that's just me, what are your thoughts on AI in general? Play around with ChatGPT and let me know your thoughts in the comments, I hope it's still free!?