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My Interview with ChatGPT
AI is an excellent conversation partner
The other day I released a podcast ‘interview’ with ChatGPT.
My goal with the conversation was to demonstrate the capabilities of the system and teach people about it’s use cases.
The purpose of this article is to provide additional context for the significance of this techonology.
What is ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence program that can understand written language and provide responses drawn from a dataset of billions of words called the Common Crawl.
The Common Crawl dataset includes books, articles, and websites, and it consists of petabytes of data.
To understand how large a petabyte is, I asked ChatGPT, “help me understand the size of a petabyte.” It responded:
A single petabyte of data is equal to 1,000 terabytes.
One terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes.
And one gigabyte is equal to 1,000 megabytes.
So one petabyte is equal to 1,000,000 gigabytes or 1,000,000,000 megabytes.
To store one petabyte of data on DVDs, you'd need a stack of them that would be over 6 miles high.
The program uses machine learning to process it’s dataset allowing it to understand and generate human language.
Who’re the Humans Behind ChatGPT
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, a private artificial intellgence research company in San Francisco headed by Sam Altman, former President of Y Combinator.
Notable investors in OpenAI include:
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter
Greg Brockman, the CEO of Cloudera
Ilya Sutskever, a leading AI researcher
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal
Where is ChatGPT
ChatGPT’s data is stored on servers in data centers around the world. Most of these data centers are owned and operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based company.
Why is ChatGPT Significant
It took five days to reach a million users after it’s launch to the public on November 30, 2022. Five days. That is one of the fastest adoptions of any technology or software ever.
Demand has been so high that OpenAI has throttled access to ChatGPT at times of high usage.
ChatGPT may not be the first of its kind, but it sets a new standard in terms of scale, performance, flexibility, and accessibility when compared to its predecessors. It excels in these areas and stands out among other natural language processing models.
OpenAI offers a powerful application programming interface (API) that enables third-party developers to seamlessly access and incorporate its functionality into their own programs. As a result, companies are leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, such as its natural language processing capabilities, in their customer service chatbots to improve their ability to handle customer inquiries with greater efficiency and accuracy.
In it’s first six weeks of existence, ChatGPT has been used to write advertisements, novels, movies, podcasts, and, as you’ve already seen, parts of this article.
I predict there is going to be an explosion of AI-augmented creativity in the coming years.
How I Interviewed ChatGPT
ChatGPT currently provides responses only in written text format. Thus, I simply copy and pasted ChatGPT’s responses into a simple text-to-speech software. There are many excellent ones out there that sound almost perfectly human. The one I used sounds quite robotic but I was okay with that.
So here’s how I interviewed ‘her’:
I recorded a question into Descript and had it automatically transcribed.
I tried to make the questions sound as conversational possible, as if I was actually interviewing someone. “I’m excited to have you on the show today…”
I copied the transcription and pasted it into ChatGPT word for word.
The only exception was that, in some cases, I added context to the prompt.
For example, after my opening question, I added ‘respond with friendly banter to the podcast host, Ross.’
Another example, in my closing statement, I wrote ‘add a humorous Benjamin Franklin quote in your response.’ To which GPT added a Franklin quote about fish and guests getting old after a few days.
ChatGPT provided a response. I copied the response and pasted it into a browser-based text-to-speech software.
I hit record on Descript then played the segment.
I repeated steps 1-4 until I had about 20 minutes of content.
Overall, I think the interview turned out quite nicely. It achieved my goal of demonstrating what ChatGPT is capable of while sounding like a normal conversation.
The idea for this was not entirely original. A few months ago, someone created a deep fake interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. Inspired by that, I thought it would be fun to recreate with own take on interviewing AI.
How to Use ChatGPT
To get started using ChatGPT:
Navigate to https://chat.openai.com
Create a free account with an email adress and password
Start asking questions
That’s it!
If you can use Google, you can use ChatGPT.
Keep in mind, ChatGPT is free to use as of this writing in January 2023 but it’s rumored that the company is burning >$3 million per day on servers and processing. Likely, they will begin charging a monthly fee to use the service and/or limit it’s functionality at a free tier.
I’m Excited
As you can probably tell, I am excited about the advancements in AI technology.
I find it fascinating to experiment and play around with the different AI programs available. The potential implications for work, play, and entertainment are truly profound.
I have curated a collection of AI programs in my browser's bookmark folder that can undertake a diverse array of tasks, from creating resumes to editing videos, generating logos and even translating documents. What's more, many of these programs are available to use for free, and they have replaced the need for human services that I would have previously hired out on platforms like Fiverr, just a year or two ago.
It's important to note that we are still in the early stages of this technology and the possibilities are endless.