Zdraveĭte i chestita nova 2023 godina! 🇧🇬

The talk of the town since December has undeniably been ChatGPT. This brainchild of OpenAI is a free-to-access chatbot, built upon the foundations of its predecessor, GPT-3. And let me tell you, it's pretty impressive! ChatGPT can hold a conversation on almost any topic in natural language, be it French, English, or various other languages, and it does so with well-structured, logical responses.

In need of an eloquent debate on management styles? Or maybe a helping hand with your philosophy dissertation? Or perhaps you're just struggling to put pen to paper for a greetings card? Well, you're in luck! After a brief moment of "thought", ChatGPT will deliver, its responses flowing effortlessly onto your screen. And if curiosity gets the better of you and you challenge it to write a rap battle between two historical figures... you might be amazed to see that it can follow your increasingly quirky instructions with an uncanny sense of adaptability!

Given its capabilities, it's no wonder that ChatGPT amassed a million users in less than a week of its launch (for comparison, Instagram took two years to reach this milestone). Having been trained on nearly 500 billion words – a considerable chunk of all texts ever written by humanity, not to mention a hefty amount of computer code – ChatGPT's flexibility is truly awe-inspiring. It's already being envisioned for a multitude of uses: creative writing, copywriting, homework "assistance" (wink, wink), deciphering uncommented code, dream interpretation, even as a virtual therapist stand-in... And to think that this model merely generates the most statistically probable sequences of words in response to a "prompt" (the questions and instructions users give it), without any actual "intelligence"!

I strongly recommend you to give it a try – all you need to do is set up an account.
ChatGPT has certainly stirred up a lot of buzz in the media and on scientific blogs. It's tough to condense everything that's been published in recent weeks, but here are a few pieces I found enlightening:

• This post from Stratechery and another one from John Spencer discuss the use of these models and their impact on education.
• Vicky Boydis has done a commendable job gathering technical information on the model's training data.
• You can also find some details on the network architecture here. The highlight is a bird's-eye view of the input-output dynamics.
• Lastly, you might get a kick out of ChatBCG, a cheeky spoof of the famed consulting firm's consultants. It can whip up slides on just about anything (although, let's be real, it's more of a gag than serious stuff, for now!)

Happy exploring and once again, here's to an excellent 2023! 😀