Beware of ChatGPT Clones

Among all the developments that have happened in the world of AI, ChatGPT has probably been the biggest and most impactful of all. 

ChatGPT became significantly popular because OpenAI made it accessible for all. A computer and a decent internet connection is what you need to talk to the revolutionary chatbot.

While many were accessing ChatGPT out of sheer curiosity, many developers started playing with it and many side projects were born, even though the official API for ChatGPT is not available yet. Soon, they found ways to integrate ChatGPT with WhatsApp, Telegram and other messaging platforms to embed ChatGPT in the MacOS menu bar.

ChatGPT projects?

US-based entrepreneur and co-founder of Cue (acquired by Apple), Daniel Gross was among the first ones to integrate GPT-3.5—that is used to build ChatGPT—into an AI-enabled assistant on WhatsApp. 

By embedding GPT-3.5 into WhatsApp, Gross was able to chat with the bot as if it were a friend on his contact list. He ran WhatsApp from a phone using the golang library then simultaneously ran ‘ChatGPT’ on a browser. This allowed him to talk to ChatGPT on WhatsApp.

Tech influencer Varun Mayya also announced something similar on Twitter. God In a Box, according to Mayya, is a direct implementation of GPT-3.5 into WhatsApp. However, on the ProductHunt as well as Twitter, he calls God In A Box as ‘Chat with GPT-3.5, known as ChatGPT, directly on WhatApp.

While it might be running on GPT-3.5, it is false to assume that it is same as ChatGPT. Moreover, ChatGPT is a product offering by OpenAI, and GPT-3.5 is merely an API. Looks like the tech influencer has either got the tech wrong, or it is a well thought out marketing gimmick.

Similarly, inspired by Gross, Twitter user Altryne has also managed to embed the GPT3.5 model in Telegram. Julian Weisser, co-founder at On Deck, even put out a YouTube tutorial on how to create your own ChatGPT Telegram Bot.

Are they really ChatGPT?

Today, many developers have shared their projects on multiple social media platforms claiming to embed ChatGPT with WhatsApp, Google Chrome, Telegram and more. Mayya, for instance, charges users USD9 per month (INR 740) to run his programme on WhatsApp.

However, do these bots provide the same results as ChatGPT? 

While users have to say positive things about Mayya’s God In a Box, one user pointed out that: “I just tried it and it doesn’t look like it’s using the original ChatGPT engine in the back end. It got a simple question wrong. So, I checked the same question on the original chatGPT and it was a different answer.” 

Intrigued, we decided to investigate.

We asked ‘Can you suggest to me 10 no-code tools?’ to both ChatGPT and God In a Box. Surprisingly, the answers varied.

We decided to give God In a Box another chance but with a more challenging prompt. We asked, ‘Can you help me write SwiftUI code for uploading a photo and giving it a name’, and these were the responses.

One plausible reason for varying answers could be that these chatbots are mere clones of ChatGPT and not ChatGPT in essence. Mayaa has also revealed that God In a Box uses text-davinci-003, which is a part of a series of models OpenAI calls, ‘GPT3.5’.

When it comes to ChatGPT, we only know that it uses the GPT3.5 architecture. However, the GPT-3.5 series consists of three models: code-davinci-002, the base model for code completion tasks; text-davinci-002, which is trained by supervised fine-tuning on human-written demonstration and samples rated 7/7 by human labellers on overall quality scores; and the most recently released text-davinci-003, the new and improved version that includes reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), a reward-based model trained on comparisons by humans. 

In a tweet, Greg Brockman, co-founder at OpenAI, acknowledged that, “ChatGPT is primarily an alignment advance—the base model (GPT-3.5) has been available publicly for many months.” Brockman further added that making it into a useful chat system required significant strides with reliably following the intent of the developer and the user.

YouTuber 1littlecoder, in his video titled, Build your ChatGPT Clone in Python with OpenAI API and Gradio, also said that, “It may not be as same as ChatGPT but the model that we are going to use is exactly what open AI has used as a base model for CharGPT. So, even though it is not a perfect clone, this is the closest that it can get to you today.”

Hence, results generated for difficult prompts by WhatsApp or Telegram bots might be different to results generated by ChatGPT. However, if your queries are simple, the bots will generate similar results. For instance, we again used the prompt ‘Will AI replace humans?’, to which both ChatGPT and the WhatsApp prompt generated pretty similar results.