I teach in the computer science department at Vanderbilt University. In my Algorithms class this past spring, I decided to regularly expose my students to ChatGPT so they could see firsthand that it can't replace their critical thinking skills. I did this primarily for selfish reasons--like most instructors, I wanted my students to rely on their own creative problem-solving abilities rather than ChatGPT to answer their homework questions. I hypothesized that demonstrating the fallibility of ChatGPT would be a more effective deterrent than a syllabus policy statement. I just needed to find its weaknesses when it came to our course materials.

A few months ago, I was waiting for the subway with a friend, a professional editor, who had never used a large language model (LLM). Standing on the platform, she told me about an article she'd been working on. ChatGPT had come out six weeks earlier, and I input her summary into it on my phone and showed her the result. I'd been following OpenAI's transformer-driven models since 2019 and had forgotten the effect they can have on first exposure. My friend couldn't take her eyes off the little gray box as the article came out, line by line.

In Portugal, a remarkable milestone has been achieved as ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has taken on the role of CEO in a startup company. Despite temporary restrictions on ChatGPT in Italy, this innovative move has led the Portuguese company to profitability in just one week. Founder João F. Santos appointed ChatGPT as the CEO of his startup, AIsthetic Apparel, while taking on the role of an assistant. He devoted only an hour each day to execute the tasks given by the AI, adhering strictly to its directives, even if they appeared risky for the business. Instead of venturing into services, Santos and ChatGPT decided to focus on selling T-shirts featuring AI-generated designs by Midjourney.

Generative AI models are the hot new thing in the Big Tech world, and everyone is joining the race. The buzz really only started with OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, a generative AI language model that is incredibly good at predicting which words should follow one another when you feed it with prompts. Google has long been working on a similar technology, dubbed LaMDA, and with ChatGPT taking the world by storm, the company saw itself forced to release some version of its AI model to the world. That's how we got Bard, Google's first publicly available chat-based generative language model, with access to many parts of the internet. But is Google really at the same level as ChatGPT already?

It is the whiz-kid of the artificial intelligence (AI) world that others are trying to emulate. In the four months since its November 30 launch, ChatGPT has shown the ability to perform a wide range of tasks, from cracking the bar and medical licensing exams in the United States to writing emails and songs, building apps, and more. The fact that it is freely available for public use has opened up a plethora of opportunities previously thought beyond the realm of possibility of AI -- even though the app's makers have faced criticism for opacity around the programming they have used to train it. Developed by OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in the world two months after its launch, with more than 100 million users by January. That early success has prompted Microsoft to integrate its Bing search engine and Edge browser with the technology running ChatGPT in the hope of improving the experience of users.