What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a conversational AI product built by OpenAI and released publicly in November 2022. It became the fastest-growing consumer technology in history, reaching 100 million users in under two months. At its core is a large language model (LLM) that generates statistically likely next tokens (words/characters) based on the input it receives — producing fluent, contextually appropriate text.

ChatGPT is used for an enormous range of tasks: drafting emails, writing and debugging code, summarizing documents, translating text, explaining complex topics simply, generating marketing copy, creating outlines, answering customer questions, and much more. Its versatility comes from being trained on a massive corpus of human-written text spanning most domains of knowledge.

Important limitations: ChatGPT can confidently generate incorrect information ("hallucinations"), its knowledge has a training cutoff date (it doesn't know about recent events), and it doesn't have access to the internet by default (though plugins and newer versions add browsing). It excels as an accelerator for human work, not as a replacement for subject-matter expertise or editorial judgment.