ChatGPT Is Everywhere, But What Can It Do and How Does It Work? – PCMag Middle East
Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
Even though it’s been a few years since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, odds are you’re still getting started on your AI journey. We’re all learning more about it every day, and knowing how the tech works can help you get the most out of your conversations.
While ChatGPT is easy to use on the surface, many complex computations that are customized to each user are happening behind the scenes. Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on gigantic AI neural networks that can process and generate human-like text, analyze images, and even speak on their own. Here’s how it works.
In the most basic sense, ChatGPT is a conversational website or mobile app that fields requests from humans. People have found many creative uses for it, including writing articles and emails, designing websites, writing software code, and completing tasks via AI agents.
While ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot today, others you may hear about include Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Anthropic’s Claude. They’re all trained on vast quantities of data, which “teaches” them how to interact with humans in a convincing way, as if they are humans. But they’re more like aliens (or toddlers) constantly trying to learn how to be a human adult. They also want to be well-liked; OpenAI recently had to roll back a ChatGPT update when it became too sycophantic.
This learning process happens by feeding the chatbot data, largely from the internet (Wikipedia is a big one), including copyrighted books, YouTube videos, and other original materials, prompting lawsuits in some cases. Chatbot aliens are hungry for as much information as possible so they can keep performing better.
The model learns by taking a chunk of text from the data (say, the opening sentence of a Wikipedia article) and trying to predict the next token in the sequence. It then compares its output with the actual text in the training corpus and adjusts its parameters to correct any mistakes. By doing this over and over across a very large body of text (or images or voice), it develops a model of language that can create coherent sequences of text when given a prompt.
This process relies on a software architecture called a deep neural network (DNN), specifically transformer networks. Transformer networks are adept at breaking down text into “tokens,” which are basically parts of words (“words” is one token, “basically” is two tokens). Then, it predicts the sequence that’s most likely to make sense with the user based on their interactions. The calculation is different for every person and conversation, requiring a huge amount of electricity and energy.
ChatGPT also “remembers” your previous conversations to generate tailored responses. The more you talk to it, the more it refines its interactions with you. If you say phrases like “that’s not right,” the model will take note and try a different approach next time. This is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF), and it’s what makes ChatGPT so much more useful than its predecessors.
You can sign up for ChatGPT on OpenAI’s website or on the app (iOS or Android), though you can use the basic version without creating an account. The free version will suffice for occasional conversations, but it limits the number of exchanges you can have with the flagship GPT-5 model in one day and the number of photos you can upload.
For serious, ongoing use, you’ll want to try the paid version, ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month. It has fewer limits and extra capabilities like the Sora video creation model and custom GPTs. The latter are miniature models you can use for specific tasks, like language translation, whereas the main ChatGPT model is more of an all-purpose athlete.
OpenAI also offers other subscription tiers, like a $200-per-month Pro model, which has no limits and can do things like compile advanced research reports. There are also Team and Enterprise accounts for large organizations. Finally, developers can also access ChatGPT through OpenAI’s API, where you pay for it based on the number of tokens you use.
For now, the paid versions also let you go back to the GPT-4o model.
With the right instructions and context, ChatGPT can be very useful. Here are a few things you can do with ChatGPT.
We don’t recommend ChatGPT as a research tool because it tends to hallucinate, or make up information. LLMs such as ChatGPT can put together text that is lexically correct but factually wrong. This also applies to using ChatGPT for coding: It might generate code that is non-functional or insecure. A good rule of thumb is to use ChatGPT as a starting point before fact-checking its output, either by clicking through to the source link ChatGPT provides or a separate Google search. (Perplexity is another citation-focused chatbot.)
Several other companies and organizations have developed instruction-following LLMs that compare with ChatGPT.
For more examples of how PCMag writers are exploring AI, check out our Try AI series.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Ben Dickson is a software engineer and tech blogger. He writes about disruptive tech trends including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, Internet of Things, and cybersecurity. Ben also runs the blog TechTalks. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
PCMag is obsessed with culture and tech, offering smart, spirited coverage of the products and innovations that shape our connected lives and the digital trends that keep us talking.
