A conversational AI assistant developed by OpenAI, built on the GPT family of large language models and aligned with human preferences through RLHF — designed for natural, multi-turn dialogue and a wide range of text-based tasks.
In Depth
ChatGPT is the product interface that brought large language model capabilities to mainstream audiences. Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, it reached 100 million users within two months — the fastest product adoption in consumer internet history at the time. Built on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series, ChatGPT is distinguished from the raw base model by extensive fine-tuning and RLHF alignment, which shapes it to be helpful, harmless, and honest in conversational contexts.
Under the hood, ChatGPT is a next-token prediction model fine-tuned to follow instructions and engage in dialogue. The RLHF process involves human labelers rating model responses, training a reward model from those ratings, and then using reinforcement learning to maximize the reward signal. This transforms a probabilistic text predictor into a system that adapts its style, tone, and content to what users actually want — and avoids generating harmful content in most cases.
It is important to distinguish between ChatGPT (the product) and the underlying models it uses (GPT-4, GPT-4o, and successors). ChatGPT adds features beyond raw model capabilities: persistent memory across conversations, web browsing, image generation (via DALL-E), code execution, file analysis, and integrations with third-party tools. ChatGPT represents a broader trend toward AI assistants as interfaces to foundation model capabilities, a paradigm now replicated by Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Copilot (Microsoft).
ChatGPT demonstrated that a powerful language model, properly aligned with human preferences, could be productized into an accessible, useful tool — triggering a wave of AI assistant development across the entire technology industry.
Real-World Applications
Frequently Asked Questions
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT processes your text input through a Large Language Model (based on GPT architecture) that predicts the most likely next token given the conversation so far. The model has been pre-trained on vast text data, then fine-tuned on dialogue and aligned with human preferences via RLHF. It doesn't 'understand' in the human sense — it generates statistically likely, contextually relevant responses.
What are ChatGPT's limitations?
ChatGPT can hallucinate (generate false but confident statements), lacks real-time knowledge beyond its training cutoff (unless using web browsing), cannot learn or remember from past conversations (unless memory is enabled), may produce biased outputs reflecting training data, and struggles with precise mathematical reasoning. It generates plausible text, not verified truth.
What is the difference between ChatGPT and Claude?
Both are LLM-powered conversational AI assistants built on the Transformer architecture. ChatGPT (OpenAI) uses GPT models and RLHF for alignment. Claude (Anthropic) uses its own models and Constitutional AI — a method where the model self-evaluates against a set of principles. They differ in personality, safety approach, context window size, and specific capabilities, but compete in the same general-purpose assistant space.