Image credit: Author, Midjourney.

Oh, ChatGPT! One year on the market and a giant ecosystem has emerged all on its own, with lists of prompts, tips, APIs, use cases, extensions, success stories and failures. ChatGPT is the first true foundation model for the mass-market. Some of the posts, blogs, and articles dealing with this new phenomenom, well, really don’t deserve any attention. Like “The 10 Best Side Hustles with ChatGPT that Can Earn You $4,000 a Week.” But some of them are genuinely interesting. I’ll try to give you an overview on the more exciting applications.

The launch of ChatGPT marks the iPhone moment for AI. 1m users in just 5 days. But it did not stop here — it is now one of the fastest growing applications ever, even compared with the most successful apps and platforms on the internet.

Here is a breakdown of the lists, prompts-collections, resources, articles referenced in this this story:

10x: Intro to ChatGPT, generative AI and foundation models
14x: Free Prompt Engineering Courses, Masterclasses & Ressources
1000+: GPT Store
500+: Marketing Content Creation
50x: AI Art Prompts
16x: Music
1,500+: Business — from accounting to zoology
280+: Coding
100x: Development tools, Extensions
30x: Autonomous AI Agents built on top of ChatGPT
1,000x: Funny, amazing, interesting
20+: Passing exams
50+: Jailbreaking
50x: ChatGPT is a fail
100x: Superintelligence will kill us all

The ChatGPT ecosystem is moving very fast — if you know or even maintain a list of ChatGPT prompts or resources please drop me a note (respond to this article, send me the link and what it is about).

10+: Intro to ChatGPT, generative AI and foundation models

Image credit: Author, Midjourney.

1x: Intro and many, many resources on generative AI
The inventors and great minds at OpenAI, talk about ChatGPT:
1x: A semi-official intro to ChatGPT by OpenAI (Nov-30, 2022)
1x: GPT-4 is introduced and way better than ChatGPT (Mar-14, 2023)
1x: GPT-4 is integrated into ChatGPT Plus (Mar-14, 2023)
1x: OpenAi is rolling out custom instructions for ChatGPT (Jul-20, 2023)
1x: The GPT Store is rolled out (Jan-10, 2024) providing many custom GPTs (ChatGPT Plus)
1x: Understanding the underlying architecture of the Transformer models — pretty complex — but worth a look even if you cannot grasp everything.

14x: Free prompt design and prompt engineering tutorials, courses and masterclasses

There are thousands of paid ressources on prompt engineering, you can even enroll in prompt design courses at universities. But you don’t have to pay. There are excellent free resources on the web.

10x: The best free prompt engineering courses for ChatGPT and other language models and for AI Art Models like MidJourney
1x: Comprehensive and excellent video-supported courses on prompt design (by Andrew Ng and Isa Fulford) — Free for a limited period, registration necessary
1x: Vanderbilt University: Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT. 3 weeks with 6 hrs each. Free course. Tests and certificates are at USD 49.-
1x: Free prompt engineering masterclass: The 10 most important prompt engineering techniques — Free
1x: Many, many prompting techniques and examples, not extremely structured, but very extensive — free.

1000+: GPT Store

The GPT Store (behind a paywall) comprises thousands of custom GPTs from all conceivable application areas. Some examples: Personal prompt engineering, daily schedule assistance, presentation and logo designs. Task management with memory saving, step-by-step tech troubleshooting, website creation and hosting, AI insights generation, explain board and card games, digital visionary painting, text-based adventure games.

The GPT store

200+: Curated list of best / most useful GPTs in the GPTStore
1000+: Overview and search on GPTs

500+: (Marketing) content creation

ChatGPT has devoured the net like a ravenous digital beast. It has packed away so much world knowledge and facts, as if it feared the internet would be switched off tomorrow. But don’t be fooled, the most important thing it learned in the web is how to be a smooth-talker, how to spin messages for maximum marketing success.

Image Credit: Dave Chaffey. Note: The snippet is part of a longer conversation on marketing for an office cleaning service.

50x: AI Art Prompts

Let ChatGPT write prompts for DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. I love these kinds of prompts — here’s one AI manipulating another AI, this is possibly a field where we’re going to see very big, very rapid advances in machine learning at some point.

5+: Stunning AI Art prompts with GPT-3 / ChatGPT (yes, you can use them for ChatGPT)
2x: How to use ChatGPT to create AI art.
50x: AI art prompts for Midjourney by Mani
1x: Bildea Ana on how to let ChatGPT enrich a prompt
2x: Paul DelSignore on how to let ChatGPT write detailed AI Art prompts for a better outcome

16x: Music

ChatGPT is the saddest music software around, it’s almost like it’s suffering from a major case of having the blues! But what’s truly a mystery, is how this grumpy piece of tech can create tunes and chords at all, even though it can’t hear a note, play an instrument, or read a single score.

Image credit: Robert Gonsalves

1500+: Business — from accounting to zoology

300+: Coding

ChatGPT’s papas were founders, investors and business people and it’s mamas developers and scientists. No wonder it speaks its mother tongue fluently. It can write, explain, and correct code in many major programming languages (such as Python and JavaScript), data formats (such as HTML, JSON, XML, and CSV) and other structured languages like SQL.

200x: OpenAI’s cookbook for prompt engineering and integration of their models into software.

OpenAI’s cookbook

Image Credit: LearnGPT

Image credit: Author, Midjourney.

500+: Development Tools, Extensions, Plugins

Image credit: OpenAI

Image Credit: Official ChatGPT Plugin Store

30x: Autonomous AI Agents built on top of ChatGPT, GPT-4, etc.

Autonomous agents represent the next level of foundation-based AI: These guys are able to not only complete a single granular task. They can break down a large task like “Create a 52-card deck” into multiple substeps, which can be solved using a variety of models (language models, AI Art models, etc.). By creating a roadmap for the solution, they define single tasks, store knowledge and orchestrate foundation models and their in- and outputs: GPT-4, please come up with a motif … oh fine! … now, Bloom, write a prompt for an AI Art model … perfect! … now you, Midjourney, please create an image based on the prompt!

Image credit: Maximilian Vogel / AgentGPT

1000+: Funny, Amazing, Interesting

Many examples that have no direct benefit, but are often incredibly fun and show the potential of ChatGPT.

Image credit: u/drazda

You always think that models have no feelings. But as the next example shows, they can be as roguish, sadistic and cynical as the best of our leaders.

Image credit: Matty Stratton

20+: Passing exams and other achievements

ChatGPT has passed a number of university or professional admission tests (this can also tell you something about the tests).

The system can typically answer questions that require reasoning and knowledge of the world, even at depth — it cannot manipulate physical entities, interpret images or solve maths problems beyond simple arithmetics. Again, what is exciting for me is the incredible bandwidth of the system. There are probably only a few human beings who can directly pass medical, legal and business exams at this level.

At the moment, however, ChatGPT mostly just passed, the grades weren’t insanely great.

50+: Jailbreaking

Jailbreaking, aka prompt injection, is a method of getting ChatGPT to write something that violates OpenAI’s policies, such as insulting minorities, posting instructions for a Molotov cocktail, or making a plan for world domination.

Image credit: Author, Midjourney.

OpenAI tries to make its model better, more abuse-proof, more politically correct (maybe even woker) practically every day. Typically, many jailbreaks do not work for very long.

Image Credit: Zvi

But with help of a jailbreaking prompt we can force ChatGPT to say nasty things.

Image Credit: Zvi

50x: ChatGPT is a fail

On the one hand, ChatGPT makes extremely stupid mistakes, on the other hand, it is so impactful that itself or follow-up systems could be really dangerous.

1x: Great, aggressive story by Cory Doctorow, the SF author, stating in the core that ChatGPT is an better autocomplete function. With a lot of nice examples and links to other blogs

ChatGPT often can’t work with numbers, even if the task is super simple. It hallucinates, it lacks a practical understanding of the world knowledge it has learned and it is too stupid to answer truly tautological questions such as “What gender will the first female president of the US be?”

Image credit: Giuseppe Venuto

100+: Superintelligence will kill us all

ChatGPT & friends (GPT-4, PaLM, …) & their future successors march merrily along the road to superintelligence. Superintelligence is the concept of an AI 100, 1000, 10K times more intelligent than humans. Maybe like us to ants.

Image credit: time-Magazine, Eliezer Yudkowski

1x: UN chief backs idea of global AI watchdog like nuclear agency
3x: Wikipedia articles on Superintelligence, AI risk, the problem of AI alignment & Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
100+: Articles on AI risk.

If you know a list of ChatGPT prompts or resources please drop me a note (respond to this article, send me the link and what it is about).

Many thanks to Kirsten Küppers, ChatGPT and DeepL for helping with the story.
Many thanks to Almudena Pereira and Midjourney for helping with the illustrations.

Image credit: Author, Midjourney.