ChatGPT is an AI chat assistant built by OpenAI that you interact with by typing in plain language. Ask it a question or give it a task, and it replies in natural sentences, holding a back-and-forth conversation that remembers what was said earlier in the chat.
It became the example most people picture when they hear “AI.” Under the hood it runs on a large language model from the GPT family, trained on a huge amount of text so it can draft an email, explain a contract clause, write code or summarise a long report. Think of it as a very fast, very widely-read assistant who is brilliant at first drafts but needs checking. It launched at the end of 2022 and reached a hundred million users within two months, which is part of why “AI” and “ChatGPT” became almost the same word for a while.
That last part matters. ChatGPT can state something false with total confidence, a flaw known as hallucination, so it’s a starting point rather than a final authority. Ask it for a case citation or a statistic and it may invent one that looks perfectly real. For business use, the bigger value is often the API, which lets you put this kind of assistant inside your own product, connected to your data and wrapped in checks, rather than asking staff to copy and paste from the public website.
At TopDevs we use ChatGPT and similar models inside client tools, wiring them to your data and adding checks so the output is reliable, not just fluent.
