What is ChatGPT? The AI chatbot explained

The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations. The chatbot has also been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. ChatGPT's website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, It has been lauded for its potential to transform numerous professional fields, and instigated public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, an ongoing period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
In August 2024, the FTC voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by generative AI chatbots (including ChatGPT) and influencers paying for bots to increase follower counts. The FTC asked OpenAI for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people. ChatGPT has never been publicly available in China because OpenAI prevented Chinese users from accessing their site. In September 2025, following the suicide of a 16-year-old, OpenAI said it planned to add restrictions for users under 18, including the blocking of graphic sexual content and the prevention of flirtatious talk. In August 2024, OpenAI announced it had created a text watermarking method but did not release it for public use, saying that users would go to a competitor without watermarking if it publicly released its watermarking tool. Although ChatGPT only launched back in 2022, and is still fairly young in the grand scheme of things, it has seen countless updates and new version launches (also known as “models”).

  • A study presented example attacks on ChatGPT, including jailbreaks and reverse psychology.
  • The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart’s law.
  • The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code.
  • Many companies adopted ChatGPT and similar chatbot technologies into their product offers.
  • Although ChatGPT only launched back in 2022, and is still fairly young in the grand scheme of things, it has seen countless updates and new version launches (also known as “models”).
  • Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

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Released in February 2025, GPT-4.5 was described by Altman as a "giant, expensive model". In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, cheaper model named o1-mini. In November 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4 Turbo with a 128,000 token context window.

Model versions

In July 2024, the American Bar Association (ABA) issued its first formal ethics opinion on attorneys using generative AI. On November 29, Rosário revealed that the bill had been entirely written by ChatGPT, and that he had presented it to the rest of the council without making any changes or disclosing the chatbot's involvement. In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., a personal injury lawsuit filed in May 2023, the plaintiff's attorneys used ChatGPT to generate a legal motion.

Agents

In December 2024, OpenAI launched a new feature allowing users to call ChatGPT with a telephone for up to 15 minutes per month for free. OpenAI collects data from ChatGPT users to further train and fine-tune its services. ChatGPT is based on GPT foundation models that have been fine-tuned for conversational assistance.
This has led to concern over the rise of what has come to be called "synthetic media" and "AI slop" which are generated by AI and rapidly spread over social media and the internet. The ChatGPT-generated avatar told the people, "Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany". Between March and April 2023, Il Foglio published one ChatGPT-generated article a day on its website, hosting a special contest for its readers in the process. In July 2024, Futurism reported that GPT-4o in ChatGPT would sometimes link "scam news sites that deluge the user with fake software updates and virus warnings"; these pop-ups can be used to coerce users into downloading malware or potentially unwanted programs. In an industry survey, cybersecurity professionals argued that it was attributable to cybercriminals' increased use of generative artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT). In December 2022, the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of its responses.

  • In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., a personal injury lawsuit filed in May 2023, the plaintiff’s attorneys used ChatGPT to generate a legal motion.
  • In August 2024, the FTC voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by generative AI chatbots (including ChatGPT) and influencers paying for bots to increase follower counts.
  • ChatGPT’s Mandarin Chinese abilities were lauded, but the ability of the AI to produce content in Mandarin Chinese in a Taiwanese accent was found to be “less than ideal” due to differences between mainland Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin.
  • Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”.
  • ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022.
  • The chatbot has also been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use.
  • Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generated peer review report on his article mentioned nonexistent studies.

Contents

One study analyzed ChatGPT's responses to 517 questions about software engineering or computer programming posed on Stack Overflow for correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision. Chris Granatino, a librarian at Seattle University, noted that while ChatGPT can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real or largely incorrect. Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generated peer review report on his article mentioned nonexistent studies. In January 2023, Science "completely banned" LLM-generated text in all its journals; however, this policy was just to give the community time to decide what acceptable use looks like.
One such workaround, popularized on Reddit in early 2023, involved making ChatGPT assume the persona of "DAN" (an acronym for "Do Anything Now"), instructing the chatbot that DAN answers queries that would otherwise be rejected by the content policy. Despite this, users may "jailbreak" ChatGPT with prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions. In one instance, ChatGPT generated a rap in which women and scientists of color were asserted to be inferior to white male scientists. The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart's law. ChatGPT can find more up-to-date information by searching the web, but this doesn't ensure that responses are accurate, as it may access unreliable or misleading websites.

GPT-4.5

GPT-4o ("o" for "omni") is a multilingual, multimodal generative pre-trained transformer developed by OpenAI and released in May 2024. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a large language model developed by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. Later reports showed the bug was much more severe than initially believed, with OpenAI reporting that it had leaked users' "first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date". Shortly after the bug was fixed, users could not see their conversation history. In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations.
These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of proximal policy optimization. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code. The service gained 100 million users in two months making it the luck of spins casino review fastest-growing consumer software application in history. Although there are paid tiers available, ChatGPT is otherwise free-to-use and can be accessed via web, mobile and desktop.

Regional responses

Google's Bard (now Gemini) launched on February 6, 2023, one day before Microsoft's announcement of Bing Chat (now Microsoft Copilot). Their leaders emphasized their earlier caution regarding public deployment was due to the trust the public places in Google Search. Kelsey Piper of Vox wrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten" and that ChatGPT is "smart enough to be useful despite its flaws". As before, OpenAI has not disclosed technical details such as the exact number of parameters or the composition of its training dataset. According to OpenAI, it features reduced hallucinations and enhanced pattern recognition, creativity, and user interaction.