Everything you Need to Know About ChatGPT

Recently there has been a flurry of interest surrounding ChatGPT- and as a previous software developer, it really drew me in…

Before I get into why, let's find out:

What is ChatGPT?

Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot; it is constructed on top of the GPT-3 family of big language models from OpenAI and is enhanced using both supervised and reinforcement learning methods.

In order to comprehend and produce human language, ChatGPT makes use of a language model (specifically Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)), which is a subset of artificial intelligence. It studies a sizable body of text data and learns the grammatical patterns and rules of a language. For instance, if a language model is trained on a large sample of texts written in English, it will learn about the English’s grammar and structure, as well as the meanings of words and how they are used in various contexts.

ChatGPT provides different language models for different purposes, gpt3 models are designed to understand and generate natural language like English, as well as codecs which are specifically trained to understand and generate code. These models are trained on billions of lines of code publicly available on GitHub, they're mostly capable in Python but they're also pretty good in other languages like HTML CSS says JavaScript typescript Ruby SQL and more.

A fun little fact is it took ChatGPT 5 days to reach 1 MILLION users- to put that into perspective, it took Instagram 2.5 months, Spotify 5 months, and Netflix 3.5 years to reach this same milestone.

Here is a diagram from OpenAI to help visualise the process:

How to use ChatGPT?

So now you know what it is, what exactly can you use it for?

Basically, ChatGPT is an advanced language model that can understand and generate text; you can use it to create content for your website, write articles, emails, tweets, cover letters, and so on.

The reason it piqued my interest as a developer is you can also use it to generate code in several different programming languages like python JavaScript HTML CSS and much more…

Use it to generate dummy data, write unit tests, translate text or code from one language to another; you can even use it to explain code, for example if there is a piece of code you don't understand you can ask it and it will explain to you like a patient teacher, granted sometimes in too much detail!

Something I found really fantastic as a recruiter is it can also help you prepare you for job interviews by having it improve your resume, write a cover letter for you and have it ask you relevant interview style questions.

Though I would advise only using it as a supplement to the solution of the above rather than banking on it to generate the answer you are looking for 100% of the time. As with any AI, it only takes a corrupt data set to return an incorrect answer; or it might produce a chunk of code that runs but goes completely against best practices of coding- which is also why I’d steer clear of this to teach beginners any type of programming.