Why ChatGPT is ruling the internet

Disclaimer

The article you are about to read comes from someone who is technologically challenged and is not adept at it. Please feel free to point out any erroneous information or misrepresentation of facts that you may find in this

With the festive mood kicking in and one part of my brain focussing on the upcoming annual break, drafting a new article this week seemed a bit tricky. But I still wanted to show up and hence, for a change decided to explore the new AI sensation ChatGPT for help in picking up interesting topics.

While honestly, I am guilty of not being an early adopter of path-breaking innovation, ChatGPT was an accidental exception. And yes, it didn’t disappoint me.

What is ChatGPT

Since its launch in late November, ChatGPT has been making waves in the tech arena. It is an AI chatbot system released by OpenAI that can respond to multiple questions, with a striking resemblance to a human but well versed in almost all subjects.

As explained by Sam Altman, Co-founder, and CEO of OpenAI Inc, it was designed to carry conversations with people with unlimited interactions and has been trained on an enormous amount of text data, picked from the Web, archived books, and Wikipedia.

For a layman to understand better, GPT stands for “generative pre-training transformer”, which is an AI model used for NLP tasks like text generation, language translation, etc. Generative refers to text generation that has human interaction like “feelers” and doesn’t sound robotic or mundane. Pre-training refers to the fact that it has been fed large data sets from umpteen sources on the web to generate relevant output for the users.

Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that it crossed 1 million users in just five days from the launch date.?

Why has it taken the internet by storm?

ChatGPT makes a strong case for itself. At a time when we are still accustomed to a primitive form of chatbots, that are only capable to answer elementary questions and designed to serve the corporate at large, the change that ChatGPT could bring is revolutionary.

Meta, Google, and Microsoft have time and again, boasted of digital assistants or chatbots that could answer calls for us, buy tickets, place orders online and answer like human beings. But time has flown by and we have made little strides in that area. On the contrary, ChatGPT has restored our faith in technology and innovation, as it showcases the ability to carry on conversations on several queries, and yet continue to give intelligent answers.

ChatGPT is created in a way that it recognizes patterns so that it can produce its text by copying various writing styles and delivering a sharp, crisp, and on-point response to the user.

Will it replace Google?

A burning question that got triggered as soon as sought help from ChatGPT was whether will it replace Google eventually. And this time I thought to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth ??

This is how ChatGPT responded, and quite intelligently I must say.

While the chatbot is humble enough to devoid itself of a comparison with Google, its further preference can lead to massive disruptions in the web search. If the prominence soars, Google may have to move its focus from search to chat.

However, with the recent call out by the CEO Sam Altman himself, asking users not to rely fully on ChatGPT, the sentiment is still neutral. Users are getting information via the chatbot but still going to Google to verify. So clearly, Google is here to stay but will have to keep an eye on the in-roads ChatGPT is making.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, ChatGPT is a game changer for natural language processing. Its ability to understand a wide array of topics and respond rationally has been hailed by one and all, however, it remains to be seen how it will be used in the coming years.

The biggest challenge right now is the verification of facts, since ChatGPT doesn’t give links or sources of information, but collates it for the user from umpteen sources in the form of raw text. Nonetheless, it has paved the way towards a bright and promising Tech future and has come at a time when the entire year has been a dud for the Technology sector, which indeed makes it all the more special.