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Meet ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions and writes essays
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ChatGPT is a new AI tool created by OpenAI, an AI and research company
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It is currently available on OpenAI’s website
Another chatbot has gone viral and the name is ChatGPT. But the bigger question surrounding the tech market is whether ChatGPT will be able to replace ‘Google’. Before we discuss that, let’s first quickly understand what ChatGPT is and who created it.
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by Artificial Intelligence technology that allows you to have human-like conversations. ChatGPT not only answers the questions you ask but also provides you assistance in composing emails, writing essays, codes, and much more.
For example, you can ask it any questions like who invented the mobile phone? Or maybe explain the first law of thermodynamics. You can ask it to “Write a poem for you” and ChatGPT will do that for you.
Who Created ChatGPT?
It is a text-based artificial intelligence tool created by an AI research and deployment company, OpenAI. The company is backed by Microsoft, LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman and Khosla Ventures.
We hope that you are familiar with the name ‘OpenAI’ as this is the same company behind the creation of DALLE•2 (an AI system that creates realistic images and art from a description in human language) and Whisper (an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system).
Is ChatGPT Free?
ChatGPT is free as of now. Although Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI mentioned that “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”
Can Chatbots Replace Search Engines like Google?
Now, it’s a very interesting question to ask. Rapid advances in AI, machine learning and Natural language processing (NLP) are enabling chatbots to have human-like conversations. ChatGPT is also one of them.
To understand if chatbots can replace search engines, let’s understand the difference between a chatbot and a search engine.
The main difference between search engines and chatbots is their memory range. Search engines are equipped with only short-term memory while chatbots have long-term memory. The results of chatbots are personalised and more accurate because of their capability to draw from historical interactions. In the case of search engines, the results are not as personalised as those of chatbots.
Search engines can comprehend the textual meaning of a query and can provide snippets including information cards, videos etc. which enables users to read results without clicking on all the links. Unlike search engines, chatbots use AI neural networks, audio, video, and NLP to pass information to users.
Chatbots are helping businesses a lot, be it in terms of resource optimization or service automation. But there are certain shortcomings of chatbots especially when it comes to regular maintenance of chatbots. And in that case, the usefulness of Search Engines can’t be ignored.
Let’s discuss the shortcomings of ChatGPT in detail:
Limits of ChatGPT
Although ChatGPT is becoming the talk of the tech town, it can also give wrong answers as it is a language model. Sometimes ChatGPT gives the impression that it’s very confident in its answers even when it’s inaccurate. So, it becomes harmful because you can’t tell that the answer is wrong unless you know the correct answer.
People are excited about using ChatGPT for learning. It’s often very good. But the danger is that you can’t tell when it’s wrong unless you already know the answer. I tried some basic information security questions. In most cases the answers sounded plausible but were in fact BS. pic.twitter.com/hXDhg65utG
— Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker@mastodon.social (@random_walker) December 1, 2022
“The primary problem is that while the answers that ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” says Stack Overflow moderators. Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for enthusiastic and professional programmers.
ChatGPT is trained on data and can not access the internet to provide results. Lack of training and biases in training data can reflect negatively on the result.
Also, ChatGPT is very expensive to run. It is quite difficult to decide how sustainable ChatGPT would be and how long it will be able to operate.
Concluding Lines
The creation of ChatGPT is a blend of many emotions – excitement, fear, and above all uncertainty. On one hand, as per the tech world, ChatGPT is a breakthrough technology but on the other hand, we have people using ChatGPT but then quickly taking their phones out and Googling the same results to verify if the answers they are getting from ChatGPT are accurate.
