This is going to get crazy. I’ve barely spent anytime with ChatGPT and I can see myself doing so much with this thing and all it’s friends.
Get Excited!
If you want to check it out, you can do so at chat.openai.com/chat, and if you want to get into the details of how it works, you can check out their blog.
Table of Contents
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques
Wikipedia
When I asked ChatGPT ‘What is ChatGPT?’ It responded with this:
This is what it returned before the network error popped up.
I’m sorry, but I am not ChatGPT. I am Assistant, a language model trained by OpenAI. I am not capable of participating in online chats or conversations. I am simply a program designed to provide answers to questions and assist with tasks. Is there something specific I can help you with?
Assistant, AKA ChatGPT
What can you use ChatGPT for?
It’s not hard to see how I quickly became aware of It’s limits, adjusted my approach and began playing around with the tool and doing tons of research. I am currently a mere novice at this but I have found some interesting things that this AI tool can do.
1. Google Alternative
ChatGPT is amazing for conversational questions. (That’s what it was designed for.) Where this truly shines is often when I have a question about something either very vague or specific.
While Google requires it’s own prompt engineering or “Dorking” to get what you want, ChatGPT is pretty good at figuring out what you’re saying so it often gives you what you’re looking for.
Here’s a practical example
My question: “Is there a tree made from a group of trees?”
Google: “A group of trees” “A cluster of trees” “A group of trees as one tree” “A group of trees”
ChatGPT: “Is there a tree made from a group of trees?”
The results speak for themselves and its pretty straight forward. Definitely my favourite use case by far.
2. Writing Assistant
Now this one may seem obvious but not the way you think. The trick is that it’s an assistant, keyword assistant.
That means it works best in helping with writing, but you can’t leave the writing completely to ChatGPT. Here’s what I do:
Since ChatGPT remembers conversations, I give it my notes whenever I’m writing something. It helps it understand more about the writer and style of writing. The more you give it, the better the outcome.
Most people try to use it like the other AI writing tools on the market but this tool is so much more powerful. It has the same type of prompt engineering you find with other generative models like image prompting. And like Midjourney, the more details and examples you give it the better it gets.
3. Learning & Research Tool
Again, the fact that it’s conversational is the best. Especially for learning and studying. This greatly reduces the friction to learning.
I’ve been learning to code again and since ChatGPT came out things are so much easier.
Most documentation out there is very technical so it gets hard to get through it and most tutorials become outdated 3 months after it comes out, forcing you to go through hours on Google, GitHub and Stackoverflow to find ‘one line of code’ relevant to your specific situation.
Or just give your code and the error to ChatGPT and find an immediate solution with suggestions on how to implement it. This is the most exciting and the biggest game changer because of the possibilities it unlocks.
4. Recommendations
This one may be a little less obvious. I asked ChatGPT to give me some movies to watch. The results weren’t the best but after telling it about my viewing history and preferences.
The sky’s the limit with this one, people have been getting everything from meal plans device suggestions with this.
A few tips for getting more accurate results:
ChatGPT has no access to internet so you’ll need to update it often. Pretend that its a friend that lives on a farm alone somewhere and give them as much context as possible.
Try pre-prompting it with the relevant information or an update with your question or request. It makes the results much better.
It works like a sandbox version of the main playground’s Text Davinci 003 chat and instruct examples with some added features. This means that you can kind of train it.
Try using the new saved conversations feature as different, specialised models focused on specific tasks and topics.
ChatGPT will get better at the task and understand what you want better.
Bonus: Regenerate the answers, especially if you’re trying to do research.
Most times there’s more ChatGPT can provide and having a few different options to choose from is usually helpful for coming up with ideas or writing.
