San Francisco-based OpenAI launched its chatbot this week and it has already taken the internet by storm.
The company, founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, has made waves with its Dall-E 2 image generation tool that lets users create intricate works of art with just a text prompt.
Now ChatGPT, the free chatbot, has reached similar virality with its ability to write poetry, explain complex mathematical concepts and even write full essays. Unlike many other chatbots available today, ChatGPT can respond to queries with eloquent and complex answers generated in seconds.
"Today’s research release of ChatGPT is the latest step in OpenAI’s iterative deployment of increasingly safe and useful AI systems," OpenAI said in a blog post announcing the new product. "Many lessons from deployment of earlier models like GPT-3 and Codex have informed the safety mitigations in place for this release, including substantial reductions in harmful and untruthful outputs achieved by the use of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)."
OpenAI has set a few safety rails that prevent the chatbot from answering racist prompts or ones that advocate criminal activity. However, users are already finding ways around the precautions.
OpenAI was founded in 2015, but has only opened its products to the public this year. Musk left the company in 2018 over disagreements over its direction but has apparently endorsed the new chatbot on Twitter. In 2019 it raised $1 billion in funding from Microsoft, according to Pitchbook.
The company contributed to a flurry of interest by investors in the burgeoning field of generative AI, even amidst a downturn in VC funding, and has even inspired art exhibitions featuring art created with its software.
