ChatGPT

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on a large language model, it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.

By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to the growth of OpenAI's valuation to $29 billion. ChatGPT's release spurred the development of competing products, including Bard, Ernie Bot, LLaMA, Claude, and Grok. Microsoft launched Copilot, based on OpenAI's GPT-4. Some observers raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace or atrophy human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

ChatGPT is built upon either GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, both of which are members of OpenAI's proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, based on the transformer architecture developed by Google—and is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning. ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but due to its popularity, OpenAI now operates the service on a freemium model. It allows users on its free tier to access the GPT-3.5-based version, while the more advanced GPT-4-based version and priority access to newer features are provided to paid subscribers under the commercial name "ChatGPT Plus".

ChatGPT is credited with starting the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid and unprecedented development in the field of artificial intelligence.