Generative AI overview
Chatbot usage and integration into academic and daily life is rapidly evolving. Please check back here frequently for updated information (last update 3/31/23)!
Chatbot is a generic term for an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses natural language processing techniques to respond to user generated prompts. Chatbots have been created by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Stanford University to name a few and have been around in some form since the mid 1960's. Remember ELIZA?
History of Chatbots Infographic (up until year 2016)
ChatGPT is a chatbot created by OpenAI and was released to the general public as a "research preview" in late 2022. It is a form of generative AI. The usage and interest in ChatGPT has been an active subject in the scholarly and news media since then. Microsoft, who is an investor in OpenAI, announced recently that the company’s tools — including GPT-3.5, programming assistant Codex and image generator DALL-E 2 — are now generally available to business clients via Azure. Microsoft has now added ChatGPT to the Azure OpenAI Service.
GPT-4 has recently been released and Microsoft and Google are testing it in their products. Microsoft is calling theirs Copilot and it will be integrated into Microsoft Office 365.
These have features similar to ChatGPT or are powered by ChatGPT in the background. Some are still not released to the public.
The New Bing (uses ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4). Reported to launch in March 2023 with Windows 11.