What Hath ChatGPT Wrought?

"ChatGPT, oh ChatGPT, the model that we've sought, with its language skills so grand, it truly is quite a lot. But what hath ChatGPT wrought? What is this thing it's made? Is it a poem, a story, or just a silly charade?"

- Raju Chellam

ChatGPT created that set of silly rhymes when I gave it a simple prompt: "What hath ChatGPT wrought?" Incidentally, "What hath God wrought" was the first Morse code message transmitted in the US on May 24, 1844, to officially open the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line.

Ever since OpenAl unleashed ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, its intelligence quotient has transfixed much of the literate world. In 2019, Microsoft invested US$10 billion, becoming the startup's exclusive cloud provider. In late January 2023, Microsoft confirmed it was extending the partnership with OpenAl; Microsoft Azure will continue as the exclusive cloud provider for the tool, since OpenAl uses Azure to train all its models. OpenAl is now valued at US$29 billion.

In the first month after its launch, ChatGPT received positive reviews. The New York Times declared it was "the best Al chatbot ever released to the public". The Guardian gushed about its ability to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. The Atlantic included ChatGPT in its "Breakthroughs of the Year" listing for 2022, stating that it "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is".

Scepticism soon appeared. In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers. The Guardian questioned whether content found on the Internet after ChatGPT's release "can be truly trusted" and called for government regulation. And school districts in the US, France, Australia, and India banned students from using ChatGPT for school or homework.