What is ChatGPT? OpenAI’s popular chatbot explained
Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the Live show to break down ChatGPT, where it came from, its functions, and its risks.
Video Transcript
BRAD SMITH: Rise of the robots. Microsoft is betting big on AI with its multibillion dollar investment in ChatGPT. But what is it? Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley joins us now for a breakdown. All right, hit us with the vibes of ChatGPT, Dan.
DAN HOWLEY: The vibes, indeed. So ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot. Basically, it provides you with human-sounding answers to different queries. And you can actually ask it a number of different types of queries. I asked it yesterday how to make a meatloaf. It's not going to be as good as my mom's, but it was a decent recipe. Or you can ask it to do things like come up with random stories. I asked it to make up a story about a maniac barber who eats human hair, and he did-- it did just that. It can also answer follow-up questions. So if you ask, what is the Bible, how long is it, it can provide you with some of those answers.
It's actually developed by a company called OpenAI, and it's only one of a number of artificial intelligence initiatives that they have going. It was founded in 2015 by a number of researchers that includes former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman. He currently serves as president. And the current CEO is Sam Altman. He's the former president of Y Combinator. Part of getting that off the ground, though, included a number of investors, including the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and AWS. They all committed an initial $1 billion to get this research going.
In 2019, though, Microsoft came in and provided another billion dollar investment. So they had already been in there. They also, at that point, became the exclusive computing partner for OpenAI. So they have that edge in there already, in addition to this new $10 billion investment. Musk, who I mentioned was one of those initial investors, actually stepped away from the company in 2018. He was also a co-chair for the company because he had been critical of the company and the way it had been operating. He doesn't think that it's being open enough, despite their name, OpenAI, and the fact that they're a nonprofit.
So then what are the risks for something like ChatGPT? Well, the software can be inaccurate, and it can provide answers that are wholeheartedly incorrect. You can ask it certain answers, and it will provide them. And they'll just be flat out wrong. And that's just because of the way it's trained. There are people who go in and look at some of these queries to determine whether they're correct or not. And they try to correct it, but there's only so much so many people can do on such a large platform.