6.4 ChatGPT and AI Assistants
AI assistants are LLMs fine-tuned to chat, follow instructions and use tools. ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and went viral.
Chapter 6: Generative AI
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and it became one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Now there are lots of assistants: ChatGPT, Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Copilot (Microsoft), and more.
They're built in stages: pre-training on huge text datasets, fine-tuning on example conversations, and training with human feedback (RLHF) so answers are helpful and safer.
Modern assistants can also read images and files, search the web, run code and remember context within a chat. They're great at drafting, explaining, brainstorming and summarising - but still need fact-checking.
Key takeaways
ChatGPT launched November 2022
Assistants = pre-trained LLM + fine-tuning + human feedback
Great for drafts and explanations - always fact-check