Decoding ChatGPT: What Is It and How Can It Benefit You?

ChatGPT—you’ve probably heard the name by now.

Less than a year ago it would have drawn blank stares from most…

But today it’s a different story.

In the blink of an eye, it became the fastest-growing web app of all time, needing only two months to reach a mindboggling 100 million users.

Yet, despite most people now knowing its name, there are still many who are not yet sure of exactly what it is, or the incredible benefits they stand to gain from it.

That’s why we’ve put together this useful guide, in which we’re going to “decode” ChatGPT and help you grasp what it is at its core, how it works, and most importantly how you can start using it to enhance your life and productivity today.

So let’s dive right in and answer the question:

What Exactly is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence (or AI for short).

You’re likely familiar with the term “AI”, which has been described as “the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines”.

We interact with AI every day, whether that’s through:

• Google, which uses an AI algorithm to provide you with your search results

• Any self-driving car, which uses AI to drive, recognize traffic signs, change lanes, and navigate highways

• Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants that use AI to understand voice commands in order to answer your questions and respond to your commands

And that’s ChatGPT comes in.

The name ChatGPT is short for “Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer” (a mouthful, we know!), and it uses AI to generate text that at first glance looks like it was written by a human.

When people access ChatGPT through its website and type a question or instruction into the prompt box, ChatGPT can help them by answering their questions or performing a variety of tasks such as writing stories or generating usable code.

So How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT is trained using text data from the internet—from websites, books, Wikipedia articles, and other writing totaling a massive 570GB.

With this massive set of data, when you ask ChatGPT a question or ask it to perform a task, it will generate a response word by word, considering the previous word in the sentence.

It can use this method to generate entire sentences, paragraphs, and even essays.

To highlight just how capable and “intelligent” ChatGPT is, it has even demonstrated the ability to pass the bar exam, a highly challenging test required for becoming a licensed attorney in the US.

And not only does it pass the bar exam, it does so while scoring within the top 10%.

In a moment, you’re going to learn how you can tap into this power and reap the benefits in your life and work.

First though let's explore how ChatGPT came to be.

The History and Evolution of ChatGPT

ChatGPT was created by a private company called OpenAI, which was started in December 2015 with the goal of making sure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

The team behind OpenAI created the first model of ChatGPT (known as GPT-1) in 2018.

GPT-1 had major limitations.

It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence, but it would often produce incoherent responses.

However, it laid the foundation for the release of GPT-2 in 2019.

GPT-2 was trained on a broad range of internet text and was a massive improvement over GPT-1.

That said—the release of the full model of GPT-2 was initially held back due to OpenAI’s concerns about it being misused.

But that changed quick…

Because in June 2020, GPT-3 was released, which boasted an incredible 175 billion parameters and the ability to produce text that was indistinguishable from human writing.

GPT-3 also has the ability to do many other things like translate different languages and answer questions…

And in only 5 days since its release, it was shockingly able to amass an astounding one million users.

That’s more than 60 times faster growth than Facebook!

And that brings us to today, with the release of GPT-4 (which has pushed ChatGPT even further into the mainstream).

GPT-4 has a larger model size, allowing it to better understand language and have more contextually aware conversations.

Now with over 100 million people accessing it, ChatGPT-4 has become a widely-used tool.

So now let’s get onto the good part, which is:

How You Can Use ChatGPT and Start Benefitting Today

Getting started using ChatGPT is very simple.

You can easily access it by going onto its website at chat.openai.com and creating an account.

To create an account, all you need to do is click the link, and you’ll be greeted by this page:

From here, you need to click the Sign up button which will take you to the registration form where you can enter the email address you’ll be using to create the account:

On the next page, simply choose your password and click the Continue button…

And then the final step is to verify your email by clicking the “Verify email address” button in the email they send you:

That’s it! When you click the link, you’ll be ready to start using ChatGPT.

Going through this process and sSigning up is completely free., Bbut you also have the option to upgrade to a paid account for \$20 a month (offering benefits such as general access to ChatGPT during peak times, faster response times, and access to new features and improvements, including the use of GPT-4).

However, even if you don’t pay the \$20 a month to use GPT-4, you can still use the highly-capable GPT-3 model for free (but keep in mind there may be periods of peak demand where its use may be restricted for free users).

Once you’ve logged on to ChatGPT, you can then start using it to aid you in your everyday tasks.

Below, you’ll find some of the best ways you can start tapping into the power of ChatGPT today to enhance your life.

ChatGPT Use Cases

Use case #1: Using ChatGPT to learn new things

ChatGPT is revolutionizing the way we learn.

Usually, if you want to learn something new, you’d have to hop onto Google, type in a question, and then spend potentially hours scrolling through different websites (most of them filled with useless or outdated information).

But now thanks to ChatGPT, all you have to do is type your question into the search bar…

Hit send (the paper airplane button to the right)…

And then wait a few seconds for it to generate a response.

This is why ChatGPT can be an incredibly useful tool for:

1. Learning New Languages

ChatGPT can translate phrases, help you practice, and provide feedback on things like sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary in likely every language you can think of learning.

2. Acquiring Valuable New Skills

ChatGPT can give you advice and help you learn countless new skills, whether that’s game skills like learning how to play chess, or skills that can help you form a lucrative new career like writing, designing, and even programming.

3. Exploring and Simplifying Complex Concepts

If you’re intrigued by astrophysics, philosophy, economics, or any other complex subject, ChatGPT can quickly and easily break these topics down for you and offer a much more digestible explanation, even using analogies to assist your learning even more.

Whatever it is that you want to learn, ChatGPT can help you learn it faster and more efficiently.

But it’s important to note: As OpenAI makes clear in the disclaimer at the bottom of the ChatGPT website, ChatGPT may sometimes produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.

Therefore, to get the most out of learning with ChatGPT, it’s important that you fact-check its responses and don’t blindly accept the information it gives you.

Use Case #2: Using ChatGPT to help grow your business

In addition to helping you learn new things, ChatGPT can also help you in a variety of ways when it comes to starting and growing your own business.

For example, it can help you:

1. Fulfill Your Content Needs

ChatGPT is excellent at generating first drafts for any medium, whether that’s emails to customers, website content, or marketing copy. It provides a starting point that could save you from “blank page syndrome”.

2. Idea Generation and Problem-Solving

Whether you’re trying to come up with a name for a new business, or you have a problem in front of you that you can’t figure out (e.g., struggling to think up the right questions to ask suppliers), ChatGPT can help thanks to its ability to provide suggestions and give brand new perspectives that you may never have thought of before.

3. Communicate with and help your customers

If your customers are asking you questions that you don’t know the answer to, you can feed the question to ChatGPT (along with some context), and it can help you come up with a response, saving you valuable time. Recognizing the potential for AI tools in customer service, companies are now even creating tools that are powered by ChatGPT and can communicate with customers and answer their questions automatically and in real time.

It’s clear that ChatGPT is an amazing tool that can help any entrepreneur take their business to the next level.

Use Case #3: Using ChatGPT for your own entertainment

ChatGPT isn’t just a useful tool that makes you more productive and helps you grow your business…

It’s also an incredibly fun tool to play around with!

Here are some ways you can entertain yourself with ChatGPT today.

1. Interactive Storytelling

If you provide ChatGPT with a topic, it will get to work crafting the opening of a short story for you. But the fun part is that you have the power to direct the narrative and tell it exactly where to take the story next, no matter how absurd. Let your imagination go wild and ChatGPT will bring your hilarious story to life.

2. Jokes and Riddles

Need a joke to make you laugh or a riddle to challenge your mind? ChatGPT has got you covered. Just give it a simple command like “Tell me a joke”, and ChatGPT will instantly conjure up a humorous punchline that tickles your funny bone.

3. Fun Facts

Thanks to ChatGPT’s huge knowledge base, it can be a source of endless entertainment for anyone who loves learning new things. All you need to do is type a simple prompt such as “Tell me a fun fact about space” and it will delight you with a captivating insight.

With its ability to help people learn, build their businesses, and have fun, ChatGPT has proven that it is an incredibly versatile tool.

Getting the Most Out of ChatGPT

Now, as incredible as ChatGPT is, there are some best practices you need to follow in order to get the most out of it.

We’ve already talked about how ChatGPT can often provide inaccurate information, and that you should fact-check its output.

Here’s some other best practices we recommend that you follow in order to get the most out of ChatGPT:

• Use specific prompts. The more specific the prompt you feed GPT, the better the output you’ll get back

• Prompt more than once. ChatGPT gives different responses depending on how your input is framed. If you don’t like the output you receive, try asking again in a different way

• Highlight mistakes. Sometimes, if you give ChatGPT a complicated prompt with lots of rules for it to follow, it may miss out on one or two in its output. By simply telling ChatGPT it made a mistake, you can get it to fix its mistake

Conclusion

ChatGPT—the fastest-growing app in the world—is an incredibly useful and versatile tool.

By leveraging the mountain of text data it has absorbed from the internet, it can help you learn everything from chess to valuable skills like programming, as well as help you come up with ideas and solve problems in your business, and even have fun.

But as with any useful tool, there are also a few best practices you should keep in mind if you want to get the best out of ChatGPT, such as not blindly accepting the answers it gives without fact-checking first, using specific prompts to get a better output, prompting more than once, and highlighting any mistakes that it has made so it comes back with a better response.

You can take advantage of ChatGPT today for free and all you have to do is create an account and start entering your questions or instructions into the prompt box.