A Brief Overview of ChatGPT: The History, Status Quo and Potential Future Development

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) model developed by OpenAI, has attracted world-wide attention for its capability of dealing with challenging language understanding and generation tasks in the form of conversations. This paper briefly provides an overview on the history, status quo and potential future development of ChatGPT, helping to provide an entry point to think about ChatGPT. Specifically, from the limited open-accessed resources, we conclude the core techniques of ChatGPT, mainly including large-scale language models, in-context learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback and the key technical steps for developing Chat-GPT. We further analyze the pros and cons of ChatGPT and we rethink the duality of ChatGPT in various fields. Although it has been widely acknowledged that ChatGPT brings plenty of opportunities for various fields, mankind should still treat and use ChatGPT properly to avoid the potential threat, e.g., academic integrity and safety challenge. Finally, we discuss several open problems as the potential development of ChatGPT.

Automated summary

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an artificial intelligence generated content model that has gained worldwide attention for its ability to handle challenging language understanding and generation tasks in conversational form. This paper provides an overview of ChatGPT's history, current state, and potential future development, offering insights for understanding ChatGPT. The core techniques of ChatGPT, including large-scale language models, in-context learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and key technical steps for its development, are summarized from the available open-access resources. The pros and cons of ChatGPT are analyzed, and its duality in various fields is reconsidered. While ChatGPT offers numerous opportunities, it is crucial for mankind to use and manage it properly to mitigate potential threats such as academic integrity and safety challenges. Additionally, several open problems for the future development of ChatGPT are discussed.