The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence calledOpenAI, lets you throw in natural-language prompts.

ChatGPT then offersconversational, if somewhat stilted, responses.

The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses.

It derives its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet.

ChatGPT is a big deal.

The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from.

A few days after its launch,more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT.

But be careful, OpenAI warns.

ChatGPT has all kinds of potential pitfalls, some easy to spot and some more subtle.

“We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”

Here’s a look at why ChatGPT is important and what’s going on with it.

And it’s becoming big business.

In January,Microsoft pledged to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI.

What is ChatGPT?

you’re free to ask it countless questions and often will get an answer that’s useful.

For example, you could ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explain Newton’s laws of motion.”

Here’s the catch: ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything.

ChatGPT has rapidly become a widely used tool on the internet.

The New York Times, citing internal sources, said30 million people use ChatGPT daily.

What kinds of questions can you ask?

you’re able to ask anything, though you might not get an answer.

OpenAI suggests a few categories, like explaining physics, asking for birthday party ideas and getting programming help.

ChatGPT’s expertise is broad, and its ability to follow a conversation is notable.

it didn’t miss a beat.

(Also, there are a lot more good rhymes for “pink.")

When I asked, “Is it easier to get a date by being sensitive or being tough?”

You don’t have to look far to find accounts of the bot blowing people’s minds.

Twitter is awash with users displaying the AI’s prowess atgenerating art prompts and writing code.

Some have evenproclaimed “Google is dead,“along withthe college essay.

We’ll talk more about that below.

One doctor says he’s used it topersuade a health insurance company to payfor a patient’s procedure.

Who built ChatGPT and how does it work?

ChatGPT is the brainchild of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company.

Repeating over and over can lead to a sophisticated ability to generate text.

It’s not totally automated.Humans evaluate ChatGPT’s initial resultsin a process called finetuning.

Human reviewers apply guidelines that OpenAI’s models then generalize from.

ChatGPT doesn’t actually know anything the way you do.

Is ChatGPT free?

You cansign up on a waiting listif you’re interested.

OpenAI charges for DALL-E art once you exceed a basic free level of usage.

But OpenAI seems to have found some customers, likely for its GPT tools.

What are the limits of ChatGPT?

Sometimes, helpfully, it’ll specifically warn you of its own shortcomings.

(The phrase is from Wallace Stevens' 1942 poem Connoisseur of Chaos.)

ChatGPT’s answers can look authoritative but be wrong.

“It’ll be well articulated and sound like it came from some professor at Harvard.

But if you throw it a curveball, you’ll get nonsense.”

The software developer siteStackOverflow banned ChatGPT answers to programming questions.

With other questions that don’t have clear answers, ChatGPT often won’t be pinned down.

The fact that it offers an answer at all, though, is a notable development in computing.

Computers are famously literal, refusing to work unless you follow exact syntax and interface requirements.

Will ChatGPT help students cheat better?

Yes, but as with many other technology developments, it’s not a simple black-and-white situation.

ChatGPT offers new abilities for everything from helping with research to doing your homework for you outright.

Google programmerKenneth Goodman tried ChatGPT on a number of exams.

High school teacher Daniel Herman concludedChatGPT already writes better than most studentstoday.

“What worries me most are educators who may actively venture to discourage the acknowledgment of AI like ChatGPT.

It’s a tool, not a villain.”

Can teachers spot ChatGPT use?

Not with 100% certainty, but there’s technology to spot AI help.

One, Coalition Technologies, offers anAI content detector on its website.

Copyleaks performed an early test of student assignments uploaded to its system by schools.

OpenAI launched its own detector for AI-written textin February.

“While detection tools will be essential, they are not infallible,” the company said.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University studied the plagiarism issue using OpenAI’s earlier GPT-2 language model.

It’s not as sophisticated as GPT-3.5, but its training data is available for closer scrutiny.

Can ChatGPT write software?

Yes, but with caveats.

ChatGPT can retrace steps humans have taken, and it can generate actual programming code.

You just have to confirm it’s notbungling programming conceptsor using software that doesn’t work.

The StackOverflow ban on ChatGPT-generated software is there for a reason.

But there’s enough software on the web that ChatGPT really can work.

What’s off limits?

This includes questions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise discriminatory or hateful.”

Asking it to engage in illegal activities is also a no-no.

“The barrier to entry is getting lower and lower and lower to be hacked and to be phished.

AI is just going to increase the volume,” said Randy Lariar of cybersecurity company Optiv.

Asking a computer a question and getting an answer is useful, and often ChatGPT delivers the goods.

But you should think twice before trusting ChatGPT.

But it can be useful and in some cases thought provoking.

Microsoft couldbuild ChatGPTinto its rival search engine, Bing.

Clearly ChatGPT and other tools like it have a role to play when we’re looking for information.

So ChatGPT, while imperfect, is doubtless showing the way toward our tech future.