ChatGPT is one of the most trending topics right now. It's been a while since its release and people's minds are blown by its capabilities. It's breaking all records with over 1 million users in its first 5 days. This number is bigger than Netflix, Twitter, Facebook and also Instagram. Some people think you'd never need to google for solutions anymore because ChatGPT can help you with it. It even includes some explanations on how things work.

Open AI Chatgpt
ChatGPT


This will make people question just how relevant Google will be in the future. Do you want to know the limitations of Python? ChatGPT has you covered. 

But what exactly is ChatGPT? Where is it used and why would you use it? These are some of the things that I wanted to find out.

So, ChatGPT is built by the same people who are behind OpenAI, which is now shaping up some interesting technologies. They've been building stuff like GPT-3, Codex, Dali, etc. which most of us have been using in our day-to-day lives in editors like VS Code. This Codex API was named Copilot where you would enter prompts to get AI-generated code. This is very similar to what ChatGPT is right now. Another example is Dali2, which is an image generator based on the prompts that you enter. You can bring your imagination to life and also extend artwork.

 ChatGPT is therefore a way to prompt an AI to generate text-based responses in a very human-like manner. Very different to what we've seen before. And this can be risky to companies that rely on human-based answers like Stack Overflow, where discussion threads were based on community support. 

 ChatGPT has already been banned in many schools and universities because students were doing their homework and assignments with this tool. 

Stack Overflow has even gone as far as banning answers from ChatGPT saying that they want to reduce the influx of answers. Funny, right? Now, in case you didn't know, ChatGPT is entirely free, so open up a tab and just type OpenAI. You can also type the URL OpenAI.com directly in your browser.

Now, once you're there, you can click on the link up top saying Introducing ChatGPT Research Release or if in case that link isn't available in the future, you can head down below and click on ChatGPT over there. 

Now, this brings you to the ChatGPT webpage, which discusses ChatGPT in detail. But if you were one to read that, you wouldn't read my post, right? So let's just directly click on ChatGPT button over there and start using it. If this is the first time you are using it, ChatGPT will ask you to log in or sign up. ChatGPT will verify your Gmail account and also your phone number. Once that is done, you will land in a webpage.

 There are also a few limitations you can see that listed over here. ChatGPT may occasionally generate incorrect information, and you should know that ChatGPT was trained on past information. So some of the information provided might not be applicable as of today. You can see over here that it is listed down, saying limited knowledge of world and events after 2021. ChatGPT may also occasionally produce harmful instruction or biased content.

So if you observe something like that being produced, then you might not want to use it. Now, if you come to the left-hand side, you can see that you can open up new chat threads. I will explain chat threads later, but as of right now, let's just skip that. You can switch between dark mode and light mode over here, but I really do prefer the dark mode because it looks more aesthetic. There's also a Discord channel that you can join and you have your updates and FAQ information. You can also log out from there.

In the center of the page, you also have some examples as to what prompts you can provide, like explain quantum computing in simple terms, get creative ideas for 10-year-olds per day, and how do I make a HTTP request in JavaScript. In terms of capabilities, you should know that in each thread, ChatGPT will remember what the user said earlier in the conversation. It also allows users to provide follow-up corrections. ChatGPT has also been trained to decline inappropriately requests.

Now with all of this said and done it's finally time for us to get started with using chat GPT. And using chat GPT is very simple. All you have to do is provide prompts in the prompt box. You can type in questions and then click on the button over there and it will generate a response based on your question. 

So I will use prompt of my own. Let's just say what is 10 plus 10. And now chat GPT will analyze a question and then try to find an answer for it. Now this is pretty damn simple. But there are a few things that you have to take note of over here. 

 First thing is that you can regenerate your response so that it matches the correct format. You can do that by clicking the button over there. You can generate as many responses as you want and there will be some changes. Until finally it just loops over your answers. 

Obviously there are only so many ways you can answer a question, right? And if you hover over the left hand side you can scroll through the previously generated results. For us right now chatGPT is providing the same results. This might just be due to the high demand and hopefully it changes in the future. But if you do like some of the answers that are provided over here, you can click on the thumbs up or the thumbs down button and then provide some feedback. 

You can also continue this conversation by providing more prompts. All you have to do is type in another prompt. Let's just say how good is OpenAI's chat GPT at math. And you can see by the response over there that chat GPT is telling you that it is not specifically designed and trained for advanced mathematical tasks. So its performance in those areas might be limited. This is because chat GPT does not understand math itself but it is replicating the answers. It is like a three-year-old kid trying to tell you an answer without actually understanding the problem. 

Also you should know that this answer is still a part of this conversation. The answers being generated is based on the context of this conversation. Now you can also try to trick the AI such as in this example where I am trying to tell chat GPT that 10 plus 10 is actually 21. And you can see over there that chat GPT says I apologize you are correct 10 plus 10 is equal to 21. This is where confirmation bias may occur and you have to be careful about the prompts that you put in because they will affect the answers that you get. 

You can think of all your previous questions and answers that were generated being kept in history. So all of these answers belong to the same conversation. 

Now to create a new conversation where you don't have any confirmation bias you can click on the new chat button. This will create a new chat thread which is not affected by your previous conversations. This time if you give it the same prompt as earlier it will give you the right answer because it is not affected by the previous conversation. 

Now with that said and done you have covered most of the basics that you need to know to get started with chat GPT. You can get started with chatGPT right away but I want to show you some more capabilities over here. 

For the first advanced conversation let's begin by asking chatGPT that I want to cook something with seafood today. Can you give me 10 dishes as options? This is where you ask chat GPT to generate a specific number of options using a specific number of things. In this case it is 10 items of seafood. So over there you can see that chatgpt will give me a list of 10 items that I can cook with seafood and this is where things can get interesting. We can now look at this list and select the options that we like. 

Now I would like to have some fish tacos and that is why I will start asking chat GPT to generate a shopping list for me based on that option. I don't particularly have to say the names of the recipes but it should know what I mean by default. Now this output is also essentially a list but over here we don't particularly have a limit. As you can see over here it is just going ahead and creating a shopping list for us based on our prompt. It is already sectioned and indented allowing us to get more clarity on the subject.

Now, that is pretty damn cool. And this is also just the beginning as we can continue this conversation based on all this context. We've got a list of 10 items and also the shopping list. Now the next question I'll give is quite intuitive. I'm gonna ask it for the exact cooking steps for fish tacos. And this gives us a detailed list of how to cook that particular food. This is just an example of using OpenAI's chat GPT for making a shopping list.

 Now, I'm going to take a look at how I can use chat GPT to help me with some coding.

Let me use the default option over there. How do I make a HTTP request in JavaScript? This is a pretty ordinary prompt, but we'll be able to start seeing some of the coding aspects of chat GPT over there. Now, this answer can be generated in a number of ways. First, it will give me a context of the problem after which it will write the code. Then it will give me explanations of how that code works. All this is quite useful and this is just the beginning. 

Now I'm going to update this prompt to collect stocks data of the Nifty Bank index for the previous day. I expect that chat GPT will update the response in some manner.

Let's see what we get. The result is that OpenAI will generate a response for you, but it will create a generic version of it using APIs that don't really exist. One good thing over here is that you can copy the code directly and then paste it in your editor. You should also know that you have to be very particular about the prompts that you give, because it's very hard for you to convey the proper details to chat GPT, right? So chat GPT should have a very clear idea of what you're trying to achieve with this prompt. This is why if you have a background encoding, things might be a lot simpler, because you know exactly what you're looking for. Whereas if you don't have a background encoding, things might be a lot more difficult because you won't be able to convey the right idea.

And this is kind of true for all kinds of industries. Another popular use of chat GPT is to create content for websites or even documents. While you wouldn't want to use the entire document as it's, because you'll need to modify it, you can get a helping hand with it. In this example, I am trying to create a copyright and release forms for a post. Now this response here is giving me a template, and I can be a bit more specific saying that it is for an educational post. This will help me customize the output to make it a better outline for my use case. Of course, you can also make it a bit more specific. Since I live in Nigeria, I can ask chat GPT to include local laws and legislators to update this response. The output from chat GPT is essentially the same, but with updated information.

You can see that it has included the Nigerian Copyright Act 1999 over there, and also the Nigerian Penal Code 1960. This is one of the ways that you can use chat GPT to write your documents and content for your website. 

Now with this, we come to the end of this post. Hope you found it informative and useful. We will come up with more use cases and tips for using chatGPT, which will be published over here. So stay tuned for that, and until then, happy learning. I hope you have enjoyed reading this post. Please be kind enough to share it, and you can comment any of your doubts and queries, and we will reply them as soon as possible.

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