ChatGPT cheat sheet:

Complete guide for 2023

Megan Crouse April 20, 2023, 5:30 PM EDT

Get up and running with ChatGPT with this comprehensive cheat

sheet. Learn everything from how to sign up for free to enterprise
use cases, and start using ChatGPT quickly and effectively.

Image: irissca/Adobe Stock

ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in January, according

to a UBS report, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in
history. The business world is interested in ChatGPT too, trying to
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 find uses for the writing AI throughout many different industries.
This cheat sheet includes answers to the most common questions
about ChatGPT and its competitors.

Jump to:

What is ChatGPT?
Who made ChatGPT?
How much does ChatGPT cost?
How to use ChatGPT
Criticisms of generative AI like ChatGPT
What are ChatGPT’s competitors?
The future of AI in business
What’s next for OpenAI?

What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a free-to-use AI chatbot product developed by
OpenAI. ChatGPT is built on the structure of GPT-4. GPT stands
for generative pre-trained transformer; this indicates it is a large
language model that checks for the probability of what words
might come next in sequence. A large language model is a deep
learning algorithm — a type of transformer model in which a
neural network learns context about any language pattern. That
might be a spoken language or a computer programming
language.

The model doesn’t “know” what it’s saying, but it does know what
symbols (words) are likely to come after one another based on
the data set it was trained on. The current generation of artificial
intelligence chatbots, such as ChatGPT, its Google rival Bard and
others, don’t really make intelligently informed decisions; instead,
they’re the internet’s parrots, repeating words that are likely to be
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 found next to one another in the course of natural speech. The
underlying math is all about probability. The companies that make
and use them pitch them as productivity genies, creating text in a
matter of seconds that would take a person hours or days to
produce.

In ChatGPT’s case, that data set is a large portion of the internet.

From there, humans give feedback on the AI’s output to confirm
whether the words it uses sound natural.

SEE: OpenAI’s probability assessments were trained on

Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputer.

Several organizations have built this ability to answer questions

into some of their software features too. Microsoft, which
provides funding for OpenAI, rolled out ChatGPT in Bing search as
a preview. Salesforce has added ChatGPT to some of its CRM
platforms in the form of the Einstein digital assistant.

Who made ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was built by OpenAI, a research laboratory with both
nonprofit and for-profit branches. At the time of its founding in
2015, OpenAI received funding from Amazon Web Services,
InfoSys and YC Research and investors including Elon Musk and
Peter Thiel. Musk has since cut ties with the company, while
Microsoft currently provides $10 billion in funding for OpenAI.

How much does ChatGPT cost?

The base version of ChatGPT can strike up a conversation with
you for free. For $20 per month, ChatGPT Plus gives subscribers
priority access in individual instances, faster response times and
the chance to use new features and improvements first. For
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 example, right now ChatGPT Plus subscribers will be running
GPT-4, while anyone on the free tier will talk to GPT-3.5.

For developers and organizations who don’t already have a

specific contract with OpenAI, there is a waitlist for access to the
ChatGPT API.

How to use ChatGPT

It’s easy to use the free version of ChatGPT. You need to sign up
for an account with OpenAI, which involves fetching a
confirmation code from your email; from there, click through and
provide your name and phone number. OpenAI will warn you that
the free version of ChatGPT is “a free research preview.” For the
Plus version, you’ll see an “upgrade to Plus” button on the left
side of the home page.

For businesses, ChatGPT can also write and debug code, as well
as create reports, presentations, emails and websites. In general,
ChatGPT can draft the kind of prose you’d likely use for work
(“Write an email accepting an invitation to speak at a
cybersecurity conference.”). ChatGPT can answer questions
(“What are similar books to [xyz]?”) as well. Microsoft showed off
these features in its announcement that OpenAI is coming to
Word and some other parts of the 365 business suite.

OpenAI’s bug bounty program

OpenAI started a bug bounty program on April 12, offering

between $200 and $20,000 to ethical hackers who find
vulnerabilities in the code. More critical vulnerabilities net larger
bounties.

OpenAI isn’t looking for solutions to problems with ChatGPT’s

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 content (e.g., the known “hallucinations”); instead, the
organization wants hackers to report authentication issues, data
exposure, payments issues, security issues with the plugin
creation system and more. Details about the bug bounty program
can be found on Bugcrowd.

Criticisms of generative AI like ChatGPT

With more and more organizations adopting generative AI, many
questions arise. Will AI be able to fill jobs currently held by
humans? What privacy and ethical concerns does it raise? These
questions apply to both ChatGPT and its competitors, since any
generative AI can perform similar tasks.

Will ChatGPT result in people losing jobs?

Whether ChatGPT will take jobs away from humans is impossible

to predict. Goldman Sachs says in an April report that a quarter to
a half of humans’ workloads could be automated with generative
AI. The financial institution notes that doesn’t necessarily mean
those jobs will disappear – instead, most will be “only partially
exposed to automation” – and it may lead to up to a 7% increase
in global GDP.

Roles that are repetitive or based on very specific rules are most
likely to be able to be performed by AI, Steven Miller, professor
emeritus of information systems at Singapore Management
University, told CNBC.

ChatGPT could lead to new job roles being created, too. At the
very least, people will be needed to prompt, train and audit AI like
ChatGPT. Most likely, we’ll see the kind of shuffle that comes with
any major technological shift as some jobs change and others do
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 not.

Some experts refer to the current wave of AI as similar to the early

days of the internet. Technological limitations still exist, and some
estimations about how many jobs would be lost through
automation have proven exaggerated in the past. The IEEE points
out that the AI industry will need to be aware of hardware
limitations and costs. Companies may not find it practical to
spend enough money on AI services in order to replace a large
percentage of their workforce. Paying users of ChatGPT can make
a maximum of 25 GPT-4 queries every three hours, IEEE points
out.

In some jobs, the AI may remove the need for a first draft, MIT
labor economics professor David Autor said in an interview with
CBS MoneyWatch. A human will need to tweak the output and
give in a unique angle or more varied wording, but ChatGPT could
write the bare bones version of a speech or a blog post.

Ethical and privacy concerns about

ChatGPT
Perhaps inspired by science fiction about AI taking over the earth,
some high-profile players in tech urge caution about giving AI too
much free rein. On March 22, 2023, a petition and open letter
signed by Elon Musk and many others urged companies to pause
large AI development until more safeguards can be built in.

OpenAI cautions that its products are not to be used for decisions
in law enforcement or global politics. Privacy, which is perhaps a
more pressing concern than global domination, led Italy to ban
ChatGPT. OpenAI has since stated it wants to find a way to let
ChatGPT work within the European Union’s strict privacy rules.
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 ChatGPT opens up questions about the ethics of using written
content created by the algorithm. Posts created by AI should be
clearly marked as such, but what about more casual
communication such as emails? Business leaders should
establish guidelines for when to be transparent about the use of
ChatGPT or other AI at work.

What are ChatGPT’s competitors?

ChatGPT’s primary competitors are or could be Google’s Bard,
Baidu’s Ernie, DeepMind’s Sparrow and Meta’s BlenderBot.

Google’s Bard

ChatGPT’s main competitor is Bard, Google’s AI generative AI

chatbot. People who would like to try Bard’s chat function need to
join a waitlist.

Now Google plans to add Bard into search. In comparison to

ChatGPT, Bard focuses more on creating prose that sounds like a
human could have spoken it naturally and less on being able to
answer any question. Bard is built on Google’s Language Model
for Dialogue Applications.

While Microsoft is ahead of the pack right now in terms of

providing chat functions to productivity software, the company
lags behind in terms of its search engine Bing. Google decision-
makers allegedly pivoted to urgently roll out a competitor for
Microsoft’s decision to add generative AI to Bing search.
(Meanwhile, ChatGPT helped Bing reach 100 million daily users.

Baidu’s Ernie

The Chinese search engine Baidu plans to add a chatbot called

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 Ernie. Baidu announced the upcoming change on March 16, at
which point the initial showing disappointed investors.

DeepMind’s Sparrow

OpenAI competes with DeepMind, an artificial intelligence

research laboratory owned by Alphabet. The two organizations
are significantly different in terms of their aims. DeepMind
focuses more on research and has not yet come out with a public-
facing chatbot. DeepMind does have Sparrow, a chatbot designed
specifically to help AI communicate in a way that is “helpful,
correct and harmless.” DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis told
The Independent in January 2023 that DeepMind may release a
private beta version of Sparrow later in 2023.

Meta’s BlenderBot

Meta released BlenderBot in August 2022. The prototype

BlenderBot from the company behind Facebook focuses on being
able to chat, providing short, conversational replies rather than
full paragraphs.

What about Apple?

According to The New York Times, Apple is working on leveraging

the tech it has, especially Siri, to create a ChatGPT rival. More
information about what the final product might look like is thin on
the ground for now.

The future of AI in business

Will ChatGPT be common in online products in the future or is it a
technological innovation forever in search of a greater use case?
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 Today its “intelligence” is clearly still in the beginning stages, with
OpenAI including disclaimers about inappropriate content or
incorrect “hallucinations.” ChatGPT may put the words in a
coherent order, but it won’t necessarily keep the facts straight.

Meanwhile, AI announcements that go viral can be good or bad

news for investors. Microsoft’s stock price rose after the
announcement of GPT-4, while Google’s stock dropped when
Bard performed badly in a demonstration.

What’s next for OpenAI?

For now, OpenAI says it isn’t training GPT-5, the likely successor
to today’s model. In a talk at MIT reported on by The Verge,
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back against the open letter –
an earlier draft of which had stated that a 5th generation was on
the way; primarily, he criticized the letter’s lack of technical
specificity.

“We are doing other things on top of GPT-4 that I think have all
sorts of safety issues that are important to address and were
totally left out of the letter,” Altman said.

He said no one should expect to see a GPT-5 rollout “for some

time.”

Also See

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training

Bundle (TechRepublic Academy)
How to become a machine learning engineer: A cheat sheet
(TechRepublic)
Hiring Kit: Artificial Intelligence Architect (TechRepublic
Premium)
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 Hiring Kit: Machine Learning Engineer (TechRepublic
Premium)
Artificial Intelligence: More must-read coverage
(TechRepublic on Flipboard)
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