Ep 58: ChatGPT 101 - Getting Back to The Basics

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You've never actually learned ChatGPT. That's okay. That's what we're here for. That's what today's episode is all about. My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI. That's what you're listening to. So we are your daily live stream podcast, free newsletter helping everyday people actually use AI, actually understand it. Because here's the reality, it's moving fast. Everything in AI every single day. If you think you knew what was going on a week or two ago, and if you think that you were able to leverage all of these new resources we had available in Generative AI, if you thought that two weeks ago and then you woke up today, different, different worlds. So that's what we're all about. So we have a special episode planned for today. We're getting back to the basics of ChatGPT. So I think we have a lot of shows that, you know, and here at Everyday AI, we've had, I think, almost 60 shows. We've been doing this every weekday morning since late April. And I think we bring on so many great guests that can help people, you know, go from a 2 to a 5 in their AI knowledge or in their AI skill sets. Or we, you know, have shows where we can get you from a 5 to an 8 or maybe an 8 to a 10. But I think that we've missed getting people from 0 to 1 or 0 to 2. So that's what today is all about. So before I kind of recap the. The Daily News, as a reminder, if you're listening live, thank you. We already have some, some comments coming in, so thank you. Arturo Rastafa. Nancy, Happy, happy Friday as well. We are getting back to the basics, but before we do, let's quickly talk about what's going on in the world of AI, because I don't know about y', all, but this week I think there's been more going on than any week, at least I, that I can remember. You know, like I said, we've been doing this show since late April, but this has probably been one of the biggest weeks in new AI news and developments since, you know, maybe ChatGPT was released. So let's, let's talk some AI news here. So first, the FTC is investigating OpenAI for misinformation. So there's obviously been a lot of lawsuits, a lot of you know, potential class action lawsuits. But this is kind of the first official news piece where the FTC, you know, so that's the US's governing body is the Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI. So pretty, pretty noteworthy piece there. So we'll keep an eye on that. That's probably going to drag on for a long time. Speaking of OpenAI, a lot of OpenAI news yesterday. So OpenAI, if you don't know, we're going to talk about that now. That is the parent company of ChatGPT. So OpenAI just announced two very large scale partnerships. So we're speaking about, you know, even that first story, the, the misinformation, you know, there's been class, class action lawsuits for scraping, you know, data or unauthorized data use. But OpenAI announced two big partnerships kind of going, going legal so to speak. So you know, talking OpenAI partnering with the AP news service. So as a former journalist, you know, I used to talk AP and you know, write AP all the time and then also Shutterstock. So you know, OpenAI partnering with two of the biggest names in just photo and images. So it's going to be interesting how this plays out because I think what's going to happen now that they have these official partnerships, all these other, you know, publishing companies that we know that Chat GPT is using the information from their sites, they're going to be saying okay, you announced a partnership with them, but you're using our, all of our information as well. So that piece, let's, let's pay attention to that. All right. Google announced a better Bard, more countries. So I'm actually going to be doing the AI in five on the new Google Bard which is just released. That's Google's version kind of quote, unquote of ChatGPT. So there's image upload, text to speech or text to speech export, which is great new country, you can save chats. So many reasons that I did not like to use Google Bard. It looks like they, they've updated that. So make sure you pay attention to the newsletter where we go over these new, these new pieces. And last but not least, pretty big one here. So I believe Hollywood, you know, looking at my clock here, but I believe the Hollywood Writers Guild is officially on strike as of a few hours ago. So they weren't able to strike a deal with you know, kind of the Hollywood studios. And one of the biggest thing it's, you know, they're talking about pay, you know, better pay, you know, streaming, all of these things. But the one of the bigger ones and the ones that's been grabbing headlines is actors, you know, and how Hollywood studios are wanting to use AI. So, you know, essentially they're, and, you know, we have more stories about this in the newsletter, but they are saying, hey, we're going to come in here and we're going to, you know, get all of this, you know, extra information, and we're essentially going to be able to use, you know, you or your voice or your likeness for eternity via a, via AI. So that's, that's going to be unfolding. We'll see what happens. So with that, that was a lot of news, but let's get back to the basics again. Have some comments coming in. Rastafa, thank you for joining. Dr. Dr. Rass, really a scientist. Peter, former guest. Peter, thank you. Your backsplash is covering your face. Jordan, thank you. You know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna change this. We don't, we don't need my face. Big thank you, Peter. All right. And Val, good morning. All right, let's, let's get right into it. Let's get right into it. Let's talk about Chat GPT and getting back to the basics. As a reminder, go to your everyday AI.com and sign up. So, yes, we do have this live stream. We have the podcast going out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, we are there. But also the free daily newsletter. I can't emphasize that enough. You know, it's hard to keep up with all these things. That's what we do every single weekday. We, we bring you the news. We usually bring you a guest almost every single day talking about a different topic. So with that out of the way, oh, and here's a great, great quote from Ben. Shout out, Ben. All right, with that out of the way, let's talk Chat GPT. What is, is if you've never used Chat gbt, let's, let's look at the history kind of, it's a, it's, it's a short history. So Chat GPT was released in November 2022. So it's been out for, what, about eight months now? So the way I like to think of it is, you know, if, if you think of the Internet is kind of a word processor, then Chat GPT would be kind of Wikipedia and a Google Doc. So one important thing to talk about, and I'm going to keep bringing it up, Chat GPT is essentially, it's a large language model. More on that in a second. But its knowledge cutoff is September 2021, unless you are using the paid version of ChatGPT. And then I say that's like having an army. It's like having an army of employees. Chat GPT, the pro version with plugins, it's like having an army. Okay, so let's look at that a little bit more. So and also talk like, why would we use Chat GPT instead of the Internet or a Word document? Well, a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is the knowledge base of Chat GPT. So the best way to describe a large language model, which is what ChatGPT is, it is a collection of everything that exists on the Internet up until September 2021. And there's essentially 1.8 trillion parameters. Misspelling of parameters there. That's, that's me, not chatgpt. You know, I make these slides, y', all, you know, human error. But 1.8 trillion parameters is a lot. So think it has. Chat GPT is a large language model. It's like talking to something that has the entirety of the Internet. So kind of like a Google, right? Like Google has the entirety of the Internet. But the difference is you can have a very quick two way conversation. So why would you use something like ChatGPT instead of Google? Well, a lot of times with Google or any search engine, you're going to put in a query and you know it's going to say, oh, this is, you know, page one of 64 million, or result one of 64 million. And a lot of times you have to read through, you know, a handful or dozens of different pages to get that piece of information, to get that piece of information that you wanted. The difference with Chat GPT you can ask a question and get an answer, right? You don't have to read 20 pages, get bombarded with, with all of these pop up ads, you know, get retargeted, right? You are just in one spot in Chat GPT having a conversation with essentially the world's smartest supercomputer. It is at your fingertips. All right, so what does that mean? It'll do your work for you.

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Chat GPT will do your work for you. So you've maybe seen it, you know, if you're a student, let's be honest, students, you're using Chat GPT to write your papers. It's a very common use case, especially among younger people, to write their papers. They're not doing. FYI, when we talk about the free and the paid version here in a second. If you think Chat GPT is good and you're using the free version, it's not compared to, compared to the paid version. It is not that good. If, if I'm being honest, okay, so even my background as an example, I'm not going to go into it. I do have some slides here on the screen if you're joining live, if you're, if you're listening on the podcast, I don't think you're going to be missing anything by, you know, not being able to see what's, what's on the screen. But in the show notes, you can always click and go back and watch the video. But essentially I have tens of thousands of hours of experience in all of these different areas. Professional experience. I've spent more than way more than 10,000 hours writing, right? I've been getting paid to write for 20 years. I've spent thousands, thousands of hours designing websites, photo video, research and analysis, brand strategy and brand identity work, graphic design, all of these things. And AI can do it better than me. That's the thing. If you're properly using AI, if you're properly using ChatGPT, it can, it's better than you, right? People don't like to admit that. And you may see people talking about, you know, oh, AI won't take our jobs because look at this output that I got from Chat GPT. Well, probably because that person doesn't know how to use ChatGPT. So that's not what this, that's not what this episode is about. We have plenty of Episodes that go into great depth about how to, you know, kind of go from a 5 to a 7 or a 5 to a 10 in your skill set. Today's episode is not one of them. And we have a whole course, the, the prime, prompt and polish course. So if you're, if you are listening to this, go ahead and throw a PPP in the comments or, you know, shoot me an email dm, just say ppp. I'll send you that information. But the, the, the long story short is AI, including Chat gbt, can do things better than professionals who have been doing these things for tens of thousands of hours. All right, so most of you probably have an account, but some of you don't. So when I say back to the basics, we are getting back to the basics. All right, we are going to step one. We are saying, how do you sign up? All right, so you are going to go to OpenAI.com and there's different, different buttons on there, but log in, sign up, or if you Google Chat GPT, you know, you're going to be taken to open eyes open AI's homepage here. So you'll click try chat GPT or sign up. Also important to keep in mind, I'm going to say OpenAI. I'm going to say chat GPT. OpenAI is the parent company, I think it was founded in 2014 or 2015. You know, also it's important to know GPT is a technology. It is a technology that a lot of other companies use. So OpenAI makes this technology available to so many different companies. So sometimes on the show we talk about companies like a Jasper or a Copy AI. So there's so many, there's hundreds of different kind of tools, kind of similar to chat GPT actually out there, but they all use open AIs, or most of them anyways, use OpenAI's GPT technology. All right, yes. And thank you, thank you for all of these comments. You know, Leonard, as an example, talking about cloud AI is better than free Chat GPT. Yeah, there's. Thank you for that comment, Leonard, because that's a good reminder. Chat GPT is not the only technology out there that offers this, you know, essentially this new way to use AI to write and to chat. Right. So in the beginning, in the new section, we talked about Google Bard, you know, Bing Chat, Microsoft Bing Chat, they use GPT. So it is kind of similar. Microsoft is one of the biggest investors in OpenAI. And then there's also. Yes, Cloud2 is a new one that just came out from Anthropology. And it was actually started by people who were original, kind of original OpenAI members. And anthropics Cloud is also backed by Google. So there's so many big names investing in people branching off and creating kind of new large language models. Right. But OpenAI is the parent company and let's get in. So if you go to sign up, you're going to have something like this that says create your account. You're going to need to enter an email address. You're going to have to verify your email. Okay. And again, why would you use this? Well, think of it. You can chat with the smartest supercomputer in the world and they can answer any of your questions. And if you do it correctly, it can take care of all of your work for you. If you do it correctly, that's, that's another big thing right there. All right, I'll even, I'll, you know, we do this live. I'm gonna try to take a question or two without getting too far off track. Nancy asking, wonder wondering if you need something like Jasper since Chat GBT seems to do the job, you know. Yes. There's so many different tools out there. Chat GPT, especially with plugins I even personally find myself using. You know, I've been paying monthly for Jasper since it came out. I, I use it here and there. I don't use it as much, but it really just depends on your use case. Right. For some people, if you have Chat GPT, the pro version with plugins, we'll talk about that. That's all you'll need. And speaking of plugins and Chat gbt, it's important to talk about this, but your data becomes OpenAI's data. Let me tell you what that means. There are chats that we're going to show you on the left hand side when you're using ChatGPT. So if you have a paid account, you have the ability to, you know, upload documents, you can train in a way, CHAT GPT, you can train a chat to be smarter, to write like you. You can give IT information past 2021 with the use of plugins. Right. But anything that you send, quote, unquote, send to Chat GPT, it's not that it becomes public because it doesn't, but OpenAI does use any data that you send to train its models. So that's extremely important. I always have to tell people, don't send your company sensitive information. Don't put in, you know, into Chat GPT. Don't put anything overly confidential. Don't Put anything too sensitive, right? And especially if you don't have access to it. Here's, here's what I tell people, though. In the end, ChatGPT and all these large language models are scraping the entire Internet. So, you know, let's say if. If it's a job description and if you want to use ChatGPT to help write job descriptions, that job description is going to end up on the Internet. So you might as well upload it into ChatGPT anyways, right? All right, so we talked about this. We're still in the signup process. You sign up, you verify your email, and you go. And one of the first things that you're going to be met with is the decision, do I use the free version or do I use the paid version? All right, I have. I have a comment here. Someone said they lost the feed. I hope. I hope we're still out there. If you can still hear me, shout out, let me know. But the free version versus the paid version, okay, I like to say it like this. The free version is like a flip phone. Not, not those new smart flip phones, but a flip phone from the 90s, right? That's the free version of ChatGPT. The paid version is like a smartphone, like the newest smartphone. Okay? That's the difference. Let's talk about this a little more. Free version versus paid version. I'm not going to go over this. And we go over this in our PPP course. So, like I said, throw PPP in the comments, but there's pros and cons to the free version versus the paid version. The free version's faster and there's no limits, but it's not very good, you know, and saying that out loud now sounds weird because when it first came out, it was amazing. But when you use the paid version, it is by far the single best tool that any working professional or student can have in their arsenal. I don't care. The fact that it's 20amonth only is kind of insane. I would pay hundreds of dollars a month to use ChatGPT. Plus, it is that valuable. So the biggest thing that I'm going to talk about here in this chart, and you can read it and, you know, if you're listening on a podcast, make sure to click and watch this piece. But yes, it costs, but the limits. So right now, you. In the paid version, you only have 25 messages every three hours. After that, you have to wait. So that's important to know. So also the strengths is well worth it, because using the plugins you can get past that knowledge cutoff. So probably, if you're new to ChatGPT, you're probably getting something all the time, a message that says, I am a large language learning model. Essentially you're asking me something. And my knowledge cutoff is September 2021. It's a long time ago, y'. All. It's like almost two full years. So yes, by default, ChatGPT is now kind of old, right? Hopefully newer, newer versions will, you know, have information by default in 2022, 2023, we'll see as new versions of this large language model come out. But right now that's important to keep in mind. Ben, shout out. Ben just said Jordan's PPP class is great. I agree, Ben, it's free. We just teach people how to use ChatGPT. There's no upsells. All right, so now that you know the difference between free and paid, like I said, that $20 is going to pay for itself in about 20 seconds or 20 minutes. All right, as soon as you understand how to learn. Okay, so we got through that. Now let's talk about the basics of the ChatGPT interface. So we went over what it is. Chat GPT is a large language model. We said, hey, there's all these other ones. We walk through the process of how you create account an account. And yes, you're gonna have to log in every time you go there. It's different than Google, right? You don't just go there. You can't just use it anonymously. You know, there are ones you can use anonymously, right? I believe, you know, or a lot of them are just connected to your account. So like as an example, you know, Google, Google's barred. It's connected to your Google account. So it's not like you have to resign in. Okay, so getting started on the left hand side of Chat GPT, that's where all of your chats go. So when you start a new chat, it's going to automatically name itself and it'll save itself. Okay? So you can always scroll back. That's the important thing. I go into this in, in the course, but you should be training these chats. Each of these little chats, you should view them as an employee who does one very specific thing. So the way I say is, is you wouldn't just use one employee to do every single thing. Right? You know, if you could, you would hire the best employee to do one very specific thing. So think of your chats like that because you're going to be going back and forth with Chat GPT and each time you are technically training it to give you better outputs. So keep that in mind. On the left hand side we have our chats and then when we click New chat in the upper left hand corner, if you have a paid plan, you're going to get these options so you can see it here on the screen, but you're going to have GPT 3.5, so that's the free version or GPT 4, that's the paid version version. And then even within GPT 4 there's different modes. Okay, so by default you always have to look at what mode you are selecting. There's the default mode. The code interpreter and plugins. There used to be browse with Bing that was kind of, you know, instant knowledge, quote unquote. They took that away because of some, some, some legal issues. But you can still access recent information with plugins. That's always the number one thing that people either don't know or the number one biggest thing that they see that and they're like, okay, yes, now I understand how this is amazing. So when you start a new chat, you have to click your mode. It's either default, which again, 2021 knowledge cutoff. I don't know if I've ever used, I don't know if I've ever used the default mode because I don't necessarily find it very useful. Code interpreter is new. Everyone just got access about a week ago. If you are a paid member, think of code interpreter like this. It's like having a data visualization pro, a data scientist. Essentially you can upload all kinds of different documents. You know, you can upload a spreadsheet with a million points of information and ask very specific things. You know about that thing on the 500,000th row, it, it will tell you, right? Huge for data scientists, data visualization, but also you can upload images, video and the code interpreter can do amazing things. I'm not going to talk about that because that's beyond the basics. And then plugins. So we kind of talked about plugins. I believe as of now there's more than 700 plugins. So why would you use plugins? Well, it, it brings in new functionality that by default Chat GPT does not have on its own. A great example that I like to use is Zapier. Zapier is a marketing automation tool. It's the most popular one on the Internet. It's been around for, I don't know, 15 years. And essentially in Zapier you can create all these Marketing automations with tens of thousands of other services. So by using the Zapier plugin as an example, in ChatGPT, you have to have a Zapier account, but you can essentially run your whole business just in that chat GPT Chat with Zapier, because you can tell Zapier to do anything with those tens of thousands of accounts that you may or may not have connected to it in your account. Yes, G, thank you. G says avoid Bing. You know, Bing, you know, this is important to know too. So Bing Chat from Microsoft, it is quote unquote powered by GPT technology. So there is, it's kind of technically a free way to get access to some of the features of GPT4, because Bing Chat is free and if you click the Creative mode, more on that in another episode. But you technically get access to GPT4, but not all the plugins. All right, so that's a basic overview of the chat interface. So you're going to click new chat, click your mode, and then in that area at the bottom it's going to say send a message. You go down there and type. All right, again this is the basics, guys. We're going over the basics. So you would type something and in this message I said, hey, chat GBT. What is the difference between chat GBT and OpenAI? Are they the same thing? And chat GPT answers. Okay, so that's the basics of what you can do in chat GPT. Ask any question. And instead of browsing 50, 100 pages, you know I've been there, right? When doing deep research on a subject with Google alone, I've been there where you start with one Google query and you are going on 10 different pages, 20 different pages and you're writing the different notes, right? Because the Internet is not necessarily made to answer all of our questions the way we want them answered. Raspa, funny question. Is that considered self awareness? Probably not. That's. That's for another episode, right? When does AI become general intelligence? So this is the biggest benefit if you are brand new to ChatGPT, if you've never used it, think of it like this. That example I was just talking about where I put in one query in Google and I have to do a lot of research, right? I have to read a lot of pages. Maybe I'm taking notes, maybe it's for work, maybe it's for school, whatever it may be. But that's a very common usage of the Internet in general, right? You search one thing, you read a lot of pages, you're taking notes. And then maybe from those notes, maybe you're drafting an email, maybe you're writing a paper, maybe you're working on a project, a presentation, a pitch. But that's, that's how we use the Internet for the most part. You search, you read a lot of different pages. Sometimes, sometimes you're lucky, right? Sometimes you're lucky and you can read one page. But I think for so many use cases, you're reading many pages on the Internet, maybe taking notes and maybe doing something with those notes. But ChatGPT automates that whole process. You know, I used to do a lot of. I worked at a nonprofit for 10 years. There would be days where I would do one, essentially one Google search. And that was my day. I would open and read 20 different pages, you know, because maybe I was researching for a grant and I had to write a grant or, you know, trying to find out more information about certain populations that were niche. And I would have to look all over the Internet and I would read everything and I would have to take notes, right? So literally. And, and I think maybe if some of you are listening, that might sound a lot like your job. And if you, and if that does sound a lot like your job and you haven't used Chat GPT yet, then you should use Chat GPT. All right, that is the basics, guys, the basics. So if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, I'm going to try to wrap this up. This is a longer episode, but I also wanted to do this episode because I, you know, we get so many questions about people are catching, you know, one of our other episodes midway through, and they're like, hey, this is all great, but, you know, this is from 5 to 10. How do I get to 5? This is this, this is the episode I hope can help you if you're not sure what ChatGPT is, if you should be using it, why you might use Chat GPT. I hope this episode helped. I hope this conversation helped. You know, we answered a couple of questions, we looked at some examples, but again, let me try to recap it as quickly as I can. Chat GPT is a large language model. It has essentially the entire Internet at its disposal, up to 20, 21, 1.8 trillion parameters of essentially 1.8 dat. 1.8 trillion data points that you can pull out of Chat GPT in a second. Right? If you're asking a very specific question about something, you don't have to waste all that time. So it is the world's best researcher, and the GPT technology, like Chat GPT is the world's best writer. So it is like having the world's best researcher in the world's fastest and most accurate writer at your fingertips. Yes, how you use Chat GPT matters. Maybe you've, you've seen examples of bad outputs from Chat GPT or a lot of incorrect ones, right? But I'll tell you this, that is not usually ChatGPT's fault. A lot of times it's just people that don't really understand how to use Chat GPT or the GPT technology putting out information where it's like, hey, look at Chat GPT lied. You know, Chat GPT hallucinated. We have a whole, whole episode on how to avoid Chat GPT hallucinations. So don't believe everything you read on the Internet. But you can't believe me when I say this. I've been using the GPT technology since it came out, so in 2020. And then chat GPT came out in 2022, November 2022. So I've been using this technology for, I guess, what, almost, almost three years, the GPT technology. And when I tell you this, I am not exaggerating. I think Chat GPT and large language models in general are going to be one of the most powerful tools of our generation. Right. I say, I think, you know, Chat GPT and large language models, in the grand scheme of things will be significantly more important than the Internet itself. Right. I mean, think the Internet's been around commercially available since the 90s. So you know, we've had the Internet for 30 years.

Yes.

There's been social media, there's been other huge advancements, you know, streaming and how we consume media, social media. Yes. But I think AI and the GPT technology is far, is far more consequential and far more powerful than just having access to the Internet. Because here's the thing, when we got the Internet, yes, it brought the, literally the, the world of information to your fingertips, but that information or those capabilities existed elsewhere. The Internet is just the world's most convenient collection of knowledge, AI. And ChatGPT is much more than that. It gives everyday people if you can talk and ask a question. It gives you superpowers if you know how to properly use it. Right? So we've talked about everything top to bottom. I agree with, I, I agree with Rastafa here who said it revolutionized every single facet of human life. So we've covered ChatGPT, talked about top to bottom. This is a longer episode. But, you know, now ChatGPT is a large language model, 1.8 trillion parameters knowledge cut off at 2021. So if you're using the free version, keep that in mind. There's the paid version, $20 a month. Great investment. Gives you access to code interpreter to data scientist, data visualization at your fingertips. And plugins. There's more than 700 plugins. I think the plugins kind of ecosphere will be bigger than you know any app store there is out there. So plugins bring a world of information and the ability to know what happened 10 minutes ago if it's on the Internet brings all of that into chat GPT. So that's the basics. I thank you all for joining on a much longer episode of Everyday AI. So we won't be back tomorrow, but we will be back every weekday, Monday through Friday. As an example, go to your everydayai.com that's a reminder. Go to your everydayai.com Sign up for our free daily newsletter. So much going on in the world of AI news. We keep you ahead of the curve. We help you outsmart the future. So I hope to see you back next week and every weekday on Everyday AI. Thank you.

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