By now there are probably thousands of really good articles and videos that explain what ChatGPT is, and possibly one that even explains it like they were explaining to their grandma. Haven't checked but the internet is full of everything you can think of.

So why would I add a few hundred words on top of the brilliant material out there? Because a buddy just asked me what ChatGPT was and I was honestly shocked. It's been trending on different social platforms like Twitter for a while now and when I explained what ChatGPT was and they were in utter shock and disbelief which was cool to watch. Virtually watch. We were chatting on WhatsApp.

So I took it upon myself to write a little something fast and share it with others who haven’t used/heard about ChatGPT yet so they can get up to speed–and leave them jaw-dropped too!

ChatGPT is a large language model. It’s Google with memory and superhuman brains. ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence model that has been trained on vast amounts of data and can answer questions on any topic in an impressively confident manner as though it was a person who knew anything about everything. Ideally a superhuman. Despite sounding confident, it's normal for it to spit out inaccurate responses. And there’s a word for that. Hallucination. It is not connected to the internet so may not answer questions on current events correctly like a question about the current weather in your hometown or a recently released anime series.

It’s been in the public since November 30, 2022. It was developed by the outstanding team of engineers at OpenAI, a company that specializes in training AI models to basically be like humans or even do certain tasks better than humans.

ChatGPT can be used in several things like being a study buddy, organizing information, reasoning things out in super simple ways so you can make informed decisions, drafting official documents or content with a confident tone, or engaging if it’s for customer service, generating summaries and highlighting key points from large/complex documents and so many other areas where you need help or an expert's opinion. You can even paste your coursework whose deadline is tonight and you’ll become almost invincible. Almost because ChatGPT can’t do the class presentations and understand for you.

ChatGPT responses don't have citations. No problem. OpenAI’s not the only one doing these cool things. Other people have long been using this wisdom of Generative AI to make smart search engines that not only give you the answer you are looking for but include citations. Examples include phind.com, consensus.app etc.

Now before y'all jump to asking whether it’s in the app store[bro did😄] or a link, let me quickly demonstrate how cool this AI is. I looked up on the internet for the hardest topic in physics and learned that it was Quantum Mechanics. Here’s ChatGPT explaining it so that even a one-year-old could get it.

Cool. Let me release you so you can play with this GPT thing for yourself. You can visit the OpenAI platform. Access is free but if you want to try out their recent GPT-4 upgrade which is astoundingly better than GPT-3, you'll have to pay a few bucks ($20) which also comes with faster loading speeds and early access to other cool benefits.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my blog! As someone who writes about tech stuff, I am always grateful to have readers like you who are interested in my content. If you enjoy what you've read, I would be thrilled if you subscribed to my blog to catch my latest posts. Additionally, I would love to hear about your experiences with ChatGPT - feel free to leave a comment & share this post with your friends who might not be familiar with ChatGPT. I'm sure they'll be amazed by what they learn!

Take care.