What is ChatGPT? Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot

• By Admin
• April 2, 2025

What Is ChatGPT? Key Facts About OpenAIs Chatbot

Interestingly, this transformer architecture was actually developed by Google researchers in 2017 and is particularly well-suited to natural language processing tasks, like answering questions or generating text. GPT-3.5 was succeeded by GPT-4 in March 2023, which brought massive improvements to the chatbot, including the ability to input images as prompts and support third-party applications through plugins. But just months after GPT-4’s release, AI enthusiasts have been anticipating the release of the next version of the language model — GPT-5, with huge expectations about advancements to its intelligence. The ‘chat’ naturally refers to the chatbot front-end that OpenAI has built for its GPT language model.

However, OpenAI’s previous release dates have mostly been in the spring and summer. GPT-4 was released on March 14, 2023, and GPT-4o was released on May 13, 2024. So, OpenAI might aim for a similar spring or summer date in early 2025 to put each release roughly a year apart. While OpenAI has not yet announced the official release date for ChatGPT-5, rumors and hints are already circulating about it.

For instance, ChatGPT-5 may be better at recalling details or questions a user asked in earlier conversations. This will allow ChatGPT to be more useful by providing answers and resources informed by context, such as remembering that a user likes action movies when they ask for movie recommendations. GPT-4 lacks the knowledge of real-world events after September 2021 but was recently updated with the ability to connect to the internet in beta with the help of a dedicated web-browsing plugin. Microsoft’s Bing AI chat, built upon OpenAI’s GPT and recently updated to GPT-4, already allows users to fetch results from the internet. While that means access to more up-to-date data, you’re bound to receive results from unreliable websites that rank high on search results with illicit SEO techniques.

Can ChatGPT generate images?

Future versions, especially GPT-5, can be expected to receive greater capabilities to process data in various forms, such as audio, video, and more. It’s worth noting that existing language models already cost a lot of money to train and operate. Whenever GPT-5 does release, you will likely need to pay for a ChatGPT Plus or Copilot Pro subscription to access it at all. At the time, in mid-2023, OpenAI announced that it had no intentions of training a successor to GPT-4.

The company says “we love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT”. Right now, the Plus subscription is apparently helping to support free access to ChatGPT. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is leading the way in the generative AI revolution, quickly attracting millions of users, and promising to change the way we create and work. In many ways, this feels like another iPhone moment, as a new product makes a momentous difference to the technology landscape.

GPT-4 also emerged more proficient in a multitude of tests, including Unform Bar Exam, LSAT, AP Calculus, etc. In addition, it outperformed GPT-3.5 machine learning benchmark tests in not just English but 23 other languages. GPT-4 is currently only capable of processing requests with up to 8,192 tokens, which loosely translates to 6,144 words. OpenAI briefly allowed initial testers to run commands with up to 32,768 tokens (roughly 25,000 words or 50 pages of context), and this will be made widely available in the upcoming releases. GPT-4’s current length of queries is twice what is supported on the free version of GPT-3.5, and we can expect support for much bigger inputs with GPT-5. Finally, GPT-5’s release could mean that GPT-4 will become accessible and cheaper to use.

GPT-5: Everything We Know So Far About OpenAI’s Next Chat-GPT Release

This paid subscription version of ChatGPT provides faster response times, access during peak times and the ability to test out new features early. This is used to not only help the model determine the best output, but it also helps improve the training process, enabling it to answer questions more effectively. Once you give ChatGPT a question or prompt, it passes through the AI model and the chatbot produces a response based on the information you’ve given and how that fits into its vast amount of training data. It’s during this training that ChatGPT has learned what word, or sequence of words, typically follows the last one in a given context. Tools like Auto-GPT give us a peek into the future when AGI has realized.

In short, the answer is no, not because people haven’t tried, but because none do it efficiently. When searching for as much up-to-date, accurate information as possible, your best bet is a search engine. The “Chat” part of the name is simply a callout to its chatting capabilities. Now, not only have many of those schools decided to unblock the technology, but some higher education institutions have been catering their academic offerings to AI-related coursework. Creating an OpenAI account still offers some perks, such as saving and reviewing your chat history, accessing custom instructions, and, most importantly, getting free access to GPT-4o. Lambdalabs estimated a hypothetical cost of around $4.6 million US dollars and 355 years to train GPT-3 on a single GPU in 2020,[16] with lower actual training time by using more GPUs in parallel.

OpenAI has faced significant controversy over safety concerns this year, but appears to be doubling down on its commitment to improve safety and transparency. Before the year is out, OpenAI could also launch GPT-5, the next major update to ChatGPT. Eliminating incorrect responses from GPT-5 will be key to its wider adoption in the future, especially in critical fields like medicine and education. Despite these, GPT-4 https://chat.openai.com/ exhibits various biases, but OpenAI says it is improving existing systems to reflect common human values and learn from human input and feedback. OpenAI released GPT-3 in June 2020 and followed it up with a newer version, internally referred to as “davinci-002,” in March 2022. Then came “davinci-003,” widely known as GPT-3.5, with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, followed by GPT-4’s release in March 2023.

Providing occasional feedback from humans to an AI model is a technique known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Leveraging this technique can help fine-tune a model by improving safety and reliability. Although ChatGPT gets the most buzz, other options are just as good—and might even be better suited to your needs.

It can be a useful tool for brainstorming ideas, writing different creative text formats, and summarising information. However, it is important to know its limitations as it can generate factually incorrect or biased content. In May 2024, however, OpenAI supercharged the free version of its chatbot with GPT-4o. The upgrade gave users GPT-4 level intelligence, the ability to get responses from the web, analyze data, chat about photos and documents, use GPTs, and access the GPT Store and Voice Mode. As mentioned above, ChatGPT, like all language models, has limitations and can give nonsensical answers and incorrect information, so it’s important to double-check the answers it gives you.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020. While OpenAI still operates a non-profit arm, it officially became a “capped profit” corporation in 2019. Everything you need to know about the artificial intelligence chatbot, including how it works and why it matters. Another new feature is the ability for users to create their own custom bots, called GPTs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also admitted in December 2022 that the AI chatbot is “incredibly limited” and that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now”. So, ChatGPT-5 may include more safety and privacy features than previous models. For instance, OpenAI will probably improve the guardrails that prevent people from misusing ChatGPT to create things like inappropriate or potentially dangerous content. While GPT-3.5 is free to use through ChatGPT, GPT-4 is only available to users in a paid tier called ChatGPT Plus. With GPT-5, as computational requirements and the proficiency of the chatbot increase, we may also see an increase in pricing. For now, you may instead use Microsoft’s Bing AI Chat, which is also based on GPT-4 and is free to use.

Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.

So, despite the guardrails OpenAI has put in place to prevent it, the chatbot still has a tendency to let biases (both subtle and unsubtle) creep into its outputs. Hallucinations can become a huge issue if ChatGPT is being used to, say, write a news article, or ask questions about historical events, or get healthcare advice. Or, in the case of one New York lawyer, use ChatGPT for a brief in a client’s personal injury case (where it inadvertently cited six non-existent court decisions).

However, on March 19, 2024, OpenAI stopped letting users install new plugins or start new conversations with existing ones. Instead, OpenAI replaced plugins with GPTs, which are easier for developers to build. OpenAI once offered plugins for ChatGPT to connect to third-party applications and access real-time information on the web.

Lastly, there are ethical and privacy concerns regarding the information ChatGPT was trained on. OpenAI scraped the internet to train the chatbot without asking content owners for permission to use their content, which brings up many copyright and intellectual property concerns. ChatGPT offers many functions in addition to answering simple questions. ChatGPT can compose essays, have philosophical conversations, do math, and even code for you. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards.

The generative AI tool can answer questions and assist you with composing text, code, and much more. A major drawback with current large language models is that they must be trained with manually-fed data. Naturally, one of the biggest tipping points in artificial intelligence will be when AI can perceive information and learn like humans. This state of autonomous human-like learning is called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. But the recent boom in ChatGPT’s popularity has led to speculations linking GPT-5 to AGI.

Not to be outdone, Google unveiled its AI chatbot — Gemini — in March 2023. Not only can ChatGPT generate working computer code of its own (in many different languages), but it can also translate code from one language to another, and debug existing code. ChatGPT is one of many AI content generators tackling the art of the written word — whether that be a news article, press release, college essay or sales email.

Up until that point, ChatGPT relied on the older GPT-3.5 language model. For context, GPT-3 debuted in 2020 and OpenAI had simply fine-tuned it for conversation in the time leading up to ChatGPT’s launch. Over a year has passed since ChatGPT first blew us away with its impressive natural language capabilities.

• Therefore, when familiarizing yourself with how to use ChatGPT, you might wonder if your specific conversations will be used for training and, if so, who can view your chats.
• Instead of asking for clarification on an ambiguous question, or saying that it doesn’t know the answer, ChatGPT will just take a guess at what the question means and what the answer should be.
• The fact that it can also generate essays, articles, and poetry has only added to its appeal (and controversy, in areas like education).
• Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs.

In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, a much-anticipated language model that will be the underlying engine powering ChatGPT going forward. The model is multimodal, meaning it accepts both images and text as inputs, although it only generates text as an output. The interface was, as it is now, a simple text box that allowed users to answer follow-up questions. OpenAI said that the dialog format, which you can now see in the Bing search engine and many other places, allows ChatGPT to “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. A blog post casually introduced the AI chatbot to the world, with OpenAI stating that “we’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way”. ChatGPT-5 will also likely be better at remembering and understanding context, particularly for users that allow OpenAI to save their conversations so ChatGPT can personalize its responses.

If GPT-5 can improve generalization (its ability to perform novel tasks) while also reducing what are commonly called “hallucinations” in the industry, it will likely represent a notable advancement for the firm. ChatGPT runs on a large language model (LLM) architecture created by OpenAI called the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). Since its launch, the free version of ChatGPT ran on a fine-tuned model in the GPT-3.5 series until May 2024, when OpenAI upgraded the model to GPT-4o. Now, the free version runs on GPT-4o mini, with limited access to GPT-4o. This ability to produce human-like, and frequently accurate, responses to a vast range of questions is why ChatGPT became the fastest-growing app of all time, reaching 100 million users in only two months.

Can you use ChatGPT for schoolwork?

It can also critique the user’s writing, summarize long documents and translate text from one language to another. The paid version of ChatGPT also offers features like image and voice inputs and integrations with other OpenAI services like the image generator DALL-E. The current, free-to-use version of ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, a large language model (LLM) that uses natural language processing (NLP) with machine learning. Its release in November 2022 sparked a tornado of chatter about the capabilities of AI to supercharge workflows. In doing so, it also fanned concerns about the technology taking away humans’ jobs — or being a danger to mankind in the long run. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot with advanced natural language processing (NLP) that allows you to have human-like conversations to complete various tasks.

ZDNET has created a list of the best chatbots, all of which we have tested to identify the best tool for your requirements. GPT-4 is OpenAI’s language model, much more advanced than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5 in a series of simulated benchmark exams and produces fewer hallucinations. AI models can generate advanced, realistic content that can be exploited by bad actors for harm, such as spreading misinformation about public figures and influencing elections.

If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form. Half of the models are accessible through the API, namely GPT-3-medium, GPT-3-xl, GPT-3-6.7B and GPT-3-175b, which are referred to as ada, babbage, curie and davinci respectively. Ultimately, OpenAI is working toward ultimately achieving artificial general intelligence, where a machine is capable of behaving and performing actions the way humans can. “We are very much here to build AGI,” co-founder and CEO Altman said in an interview with StrictlyVC.

• So, OpenAI might aim for a similar spring or summer date in early 2025 to put each release roughly a year apart.
• Besides being better at churning faster results, GPT-5 is expected to be more factually correct.
• For example, you could create one bot to give you cooking advice, and another to generate ideas for your next screenplay, and another to explain complicated scientific concepts to you.
• Neither company disclosed the investment value, but unnamed sources told Bloomberg that it could total $10 billion over multiple years.
• In contrast, free tier users have no choice over which model they can use.

GPT-4 sparked multiple debates around the ethical use of AI and how it may be detrimental to humanity. It was shortly followed by an open letter signed by hundreds of tech leaders, educationists, and dignitaries, including Chat GPT Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, calling for a pause on the training of systems “more advanced than GPT-4.” Of course, the sources in the report could be mistaken, and GPT-5 could launch later for reasons aside from testing.

However, the “o” in the title stands for “omni”, referring to its multimodal capabilities, which allow the model to understand text, audio, image, and video inputs and output text, audio, and image outputs. In January 2023, OpenAI released a free tool to detect AI-generated text. Unfortunately, OpenAI’s classifier tool could only correctly identify 26% of AI-written text with a “likely AI-written” designation. Furthermore, it provided false positives 9% of the time, incorrectly identifying human-written work as AI-produced.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the latest news and rumors surrounding ChatGPT-5 and all things OpenAI. It may be a several more months before OpenAI officially announces the release date for GPT-5, but we will likely get more leaks and info as we get closer to that date. This groundbreaking collaboration has changed the game for OpenAI by creating a way for privacy-minded users to access ChatGPT without sharing their data.

The plugins expanded ChatGPT’s abilities, allowing it to assist with many more activities, such as planning a trip or finding a place to eat. Also, technically speaking, if you, as a user, copy and paste ChatGPT’s response, that is an act of plagiarism because you are claiming someone else’s work as your own. The AI assistant can identify inappropriate submissions to prevent unsafe content generation. OpenAI recommends you provide feedback on what ChatGPT generates by using the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons to improve its underlying model. You can also join the startup’s Bug Bounty program, which offers up to $20,000 for reporting security bugs and safety issues. Upon launching the prototype, users were given a waitlist to sign up for.

A search engine indexes web pages on the internet to help users find information. OpenAI will, by default, use your conversations with the free chatbot to train data and refine its models. You can opt out of it using your data for model training by clicking on the question mark in the bottom left-hand corner, Settings, and turning off “Improve the model for everyone.” Therefore, when familiarizing yourself with how to use ChatGPT, you might wonder if your specific conversations will be used for training and, if so, who can view your chats. For example, chatbots can write an entire essay in seconds, raising concerns about students cheating and not learning how to write properly.

The ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence is completely private and doesn’t require an additional subscription (at least, not yet). Altman hinted that GPT-5 will have better reasoning capabilities, make fewer mistakes, and “go off the rails” less. He also noted that he hopes it will be useful for “a much wider variety of tasks” compared to previous models. OpenAI recently released demos of new capabilities coming to ChatGPT with the release of GPT-4o. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, commented in an interview during the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival that ChatGPT-5 will resolve many of the errors in GPT-4, describing it as “a significant leap forward.” An official blog post originally published on May 28 notes, “OpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities.”

Is ChatGPT better than a search engine?

Instead of asking for clarification on ambiguous questions, the model guesses what your question means, which can lead to poor responses. Generative AI models are also subject to hallucinations, which can result in inaccurate responses. As of May 2024, the free version of ChatGPT can get responses from both the GPT-4o model and the web. It will only pull its answer from, and ultimately list, a handful of sources instead of showing nearly endless search results. Generative AI models of this type are trained on vast amounts of information from the internet, including websites, books, news articles, and more. Since OpenAI discontinued DALL-E 2 in February 2024, the only way to access its most advanced AI image generator, DALL-E 3, through OpenAI’s offerings is via its chatbot.

At the center of this clamor lies ChatGPT, the popular chat-based AI tool capable of human-like conversations. GPT-4 brought a few notable upgrades over previous language models in the GPT family, particularly in terms of logical reasoning. And while it still doesn’t know about events post-2021, GPT-4 has broader general knowledge and knows a lot more about the world around us. OpenAI also said the model can handle up to 25,000 words of text, allowing you to cross-examine or analyze long documents. ChatGPT’s use of a transformer model (the “T” in ChatGPT) makes it a good tool for keyword research.

Leverage it in conjunction with other tools and techniques, including your own creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking skills. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can input an existing piece of text into ChatGPT and ask it to identify uses of passive voice, repetitive phrases or word usage, or grammatical errors. This could be particularly useful if you’re writing in a language you’re not a native speaker. Despite ChatGPT’s extensive abilities, other chatbots have advantages that might be better suited for your use case, including Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, Jasper, and more. These submissions include questions that violate someone’s rights, are offensive, are discriminatory, or involve illegal activities. The ChatGPT model can also challenge incorrect premises, answer follow-up questions, and even admit mistakes when you point them out.

The newest version of OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E, was made available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users. This update allows users to create customized GPTs that follow specific instructions and knowledge provided by the builder. The GPT Store allows users to share their customized GPT models with others. According to OpenAI, builders based in the United States will be eligible for payments based on the usage of their custom GPTs. OpenAI has disclosed very little about how big the model is, and is keeping just how much data it has been trained on under wraps, claiming both competitive and safety reasons.

ChatGPT-5 could arrive as early as late 2024, although more in-depth safety checks could push it back to early or mid-2025. We can expect it to feature improved conversational skills, better language processing, improved contextual understanding, more personalization, stronger safety features, and more. It will likely also appear in more third-party apps, devices, and services like Apple Intelligence. Neither Apple nor OpenAI have announced yet how soon Apple Intelligence will receive access to future ChatGPT updates.

Users sometimes need to reword questions multiple times for ChatGPT to understand their intent. A bigger limitation is a lack of quality in responses, which can sometimes be plausible-sounding but are verbose or make no practical sense. This update allows ChatGPT to remember details from previous conversations and tailor its future responses accordingly. chat gpt-5 This can include factual information — like dietary restrictions or relevant details about the user’s business — as well as stylistic preferences like brevity or a specific kind of outline. According to an OpenAI blog post, ChatGPT will build memories on its own over time, though users can also prompt the bot to remember specific details — or forget them.

Here’s an overview of everything we know so far, including the anticipated release date, pricing, and potential features. Considering how it renders machines capable of making their own decisions, AGI is seen as a threat to humanity, echoed in a blog written by Sam Altman in February 2023. In the blog, Altman weighs AGI’s potential benefits while citing the risk of “grievous harm to the world.” The OpenAI CEO also calls on global conventions about governing, distributing benefits of, and sharing access to AI. Since then, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed — at least twice — that OpenAI is not working on GPT-5. Even though some researchers claimed that the current-generation GPT-4 shows “sparks of AGI”, we’re still a long way from true artificial general intelligence.

Over a month after the announcement, Google began rolling out access to Bard first via a waitlist. The biggest perk of Gemini is that it has Google Search at its core and has the same feel as Google products. Therefore, if you are an avid Google user, Gemini might be the best AI chatbot for you. Copilot uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, which means that since its launch, it has been more efficient and capable than the standard, free version of ChatGPT, which was powered by GPT 3.5 at the time. At the time, Copilot boasted several other features over ChatGPT, such as access to the internet, knowledge of current information, and footnotes.

So, consider this a strong rumor, but this is the first time we’ve seen a potential release date for GPT-5 from a reputable source. Also, we now know that GPT-5 is reportedly complete enough to undergo testing, which means its major training run is likely complete. Explore its features and limitations and some tips on how it should (and potentially should not) be used.

ChatGPT has been created with one main objective – to predict the next word in a sentence, based on what’s typically happened in the gigabytes of text data that it’s been trained on. ChatGPT Plus costs $20 p/month (around £16 / AU$30) and brings many benefits over the free tier, in particular a choice of which model to use. OpenAI says that its responses “may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times”.

These fears even led some school districts to block access when ChatGPT initially launched. ChatGPT kicked off what some prognosticators are calling a generative AI “arms race,” in which tech companies compete to produce advanced AI technology and bring the best AI chatbots to market. But for those who want an upgrade over the free version, a paid subscription version, called ChatGPT Plus, is also available. Instead of a list of websites, though, it’ll provide users with a simple list of answers. For instance, if you ask ChatGPT a question like “What sites should I see in my upcoming vacation to Paris?