[gamegoblin]

This is mostly correct. GPT3.5 is better, has a larger context window, etc. But it's a very incremental step above GPT3.

I had wired up GPT3 to a Twilio phone number and made something basically like ChatGPT months before ChatGPT was released -- me and my friends texted it all the time to get information, similar to how people use ChatGPT. The prompt to get decent performance is super simple. Just something like:

    The following is a transcript between a human and a helpful AI assistant.
    The AI assistant is knowledgeable about most facts of the world and provides concise answers to questions.

    Transcript:
    {splice in the last 30 messages of the conversation}

    The next thing the assistant says is:

Over time I did upgrade the prompt a bit to improve performance for specific kinds of queries, but nothing crazy.

Cost me $10-20/mo to run for the low/moderate use by me and a few friends.

Interestingly, for people who didn't know its limitations / how to break it, it was basically passing the turing test. ChatGPT is inhumanly wordy, whereas GPT3 can actually be much more concise when prompted to do so. If, instead of prompting it that it is an AI assistant, you prompt it that it is a close friend with XYZ personality traits, it does a very good job of carrying on a light SMS conversation.

[andai]

>If [...] you prompt it that it is a close friend with XYZ personality traits

A couple years ago a friend and I trained GPT-2 on our WhatsApp chat history. GPT-2 was more primitive, but it still managed to capture the gist of our personalities and interests, which was equal parts amusing and embarrassing.

We'd have it generate random chats, or ask it questions to see what simulated versions of ourselves would say.

[merely-unlikely]

I half remember one of Google’s many chat apps having an AI assistant a number of years ago (Allo maybe?)