ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in 2022. It currently uses GPT-5, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. 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). OpenAI operates the service on a freemium model. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts.

By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. As of 2025, ChatGPT's website is among the 5 most-visited websites globally, and has over 700 million active weekly users. It has been lauded as a revolutionary tool that could transform numerous professional fields. At the same time, its release prompted extensive media coverage and public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work.

Despite its acclaim, the chatbot has been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations. Biases in its training data have been reflected in its responses. The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. These issues have led to its use being restricted in some workplaces and educational institutions and have prompted widespread calls for the regulation of artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT is based on GPT foundation models that have been fine-tuned for conversational assistance. The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Both approaches employed human trainers to improve model performance. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers acted as both the user and the AI assistant. In the reinforcement learning stage, human trainers first ranked responses generated by the model in previous conversations. 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.

To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as "torture". OpenAI's outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California.

OpenAI collects data from ChatGPT users to further train and fine-tune its services. Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback.

ChatGPT's training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia.

ChatGPT is a conversational chatbot and artificial intelligence assistant built on large language model technology. It is designed to generate human-like text and can carry out a wide variety of tasks. These include, among many others, writing and debugging computer programs, composing music, scripts, fairy tales, and essays, answering questions (sometimes at a level exceeding that of an average human test-taker), and generating business concepts.