What is GPT Chatbot?
In simple terms it is a conversational style Chatbot which has a (very, very, very) large dataset it was trained on. It has the capability to answer questions, provide information or create text. Related to almost any topics on this planet (or universe for that matter) from assisting with software code, to how to lay wall tiles. It is designed to work in human like conversational way enabling you to ask it questions and also follow up on previous questions.
I first heard about this from a podcast show The WAN Show (link here). After listening to this and playing with it for quite a few hours. I saw how revolutionising it is and started incorporating it in my day-to-day life. Seeing how popular it is becoming and its capabilities I just had to share it with the world something about it.
How does it work?
I am not going to pretend to know how ChatGPT works, as I am not a ML expert (although I have dabbled in it). My understanding is that it is Chat GPT was trained on the OpenAI GPT3.5 Model using deep neural networks, in collaboration with Microsoft on Azure supercomputers. The dataset itself is from 2021 and consists of five large data sources including, Wikipedia, Web Crawlers, Book1 and Book2 datasets. If you wish to know more about how it works here are a few good links:
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT
https://www.datacamp.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-gpt-3
What can you do with it?
I think the easiest way to to understand its power is to showcase it.
Soo I spent a good few hours with this, and probably the greatest use I found for it soo far is to assist me with writing codes for unique tasks, stuff I would usually cobble together based on google searches and StackOverflow. You can ask this thing and it will give you something very close to what you want.
As an example, one of the first questions I asked it was, I wanted a simple python code to help me power off AWS EC2 instances in another AWS Account:
Admittedly this is not a complicated script and something that could be easily written, but it saved me to 20 mininutes or soo looking through AWS SDK documentation to find the right functions and filters.
In addition to this I was able to modify my request asking it to using roleshifting soo I could use a landing zone model to run this script.
Continuing on in the theme of coding, I attempted to upload a PS Script I had written to do an arbitrary task and asked it to tell me what this script does and also add comments to it. Which to my surpise it was able to do perfectly.
It was at this point I realised its power, and how it will be a game changer not only for the tech industry but all other industries including education.
Why is this soo signficant?
If you go check out youtube and see what other people are using this for, atleast in the Dev space and the tech industry this has the potentialy to replace “code monkeys”. To be fair this Chatbot is not perfect, and has a few issues to name a few:
- The Dataset that this model was traned on was based on data from 2021 soo it is no way upto date
- This is still machine learning NOT AI. which means it still needs real world data to improve, and although I dont know the full dataset, I have a hunch that the dataset was created by crawling the web, soo services such as StackOverflow are still needed soo this can learn stuff from humans
- It is not always right, I found that some of the times when you get a response it may be incorrect or inaccurate and instead of telling you I dont know, it will provide you a response which, it will think is correct but it may not be. A simple example of this is, I asked it to write me a PS Script which will go and check a CSV and tell me if the user exists in AD or not. It was able to provide me with a script which from the surface looked correct, until I went to go run it and it had a few syntax issues I had to fix myself.
Despite these limitations, I can see this being a good tool to “assist” developers NOT replace them. This is something which you need to either get onboard and understand how to use this in your work or see someone else using it and replace your job. As an example you could use this to write out a skeleton of a basic code and then modify it to meet your personal use case.
The way I see this, the ChatGPT will redefine a developers job, involving them from just writing codes to being engineers and architect. who needs to know how to ask the right question and validate if it meets their purpose. Moving forward the workflow will be:
- Wording your question correctly to ChatGPT
- validate the output is correct and if required ask ChatGPT to modify it
- Take the output, Review, Test and Validate that the output is correct
- Modify the output to meet your unique use case
- Test, Test, Test before pushing it to Prod.
It is soo significant that in Dec 2022 StackOverflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating response s to questions.
How do you get onboard?
ChatGPT is currently open for free for personal use, and you can try it out here. Huge shout out to OpenAI themselves for introducing the next best thing on the internet after Google.
I think this Tweet just summarises it:
