Originally published as https://reurl.cc/V832p5
ChatGPT is a record breaker. One week after its launch, it reached 1 million users and more than 57 million monthly users in the first month. No chatbot has ever gotten this much attention or people talking so much. The impressive performance of ChatGPT, beyond all doubt, makes the public consider how it will change lives and be concerned if it may replace jobs anytime soon.
Similar discussions have occurred in the area of web scraping. Only about a month after ChatGPT’s launch, the question “How will ChatGPT affect web scraping?” was first posted on Reddit.
How much will ChatGPT change data extraction? Or, to put it more pessimistically, will ChatGPT eliminate the need for web scraping tools? To answer this question, we must have a clear idea about what ChatGPT is and what it can do in terms of web scraping first.
Table of Contents
- Toy or Tool? What is ChatGPT
- How Will ChatGPT Affect Web Scraping Tools?
- Web Scraping Tools are Still Indispensable
Toy or Tool? What is ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI language model. If you inquire about how to address it, it will reply that you can call it “ChatGPT” or “AI”. And its pronouns are “it” or “the model”. The experience of talking with it is very similar to talking with a real person, except it claims “I do not have personal preferences or emotions.”
As a chatbot that is developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family. GPT-3, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model capable of generating human-like text. OpenAI has fed the model 300 billion words via 570 GB of plain text, including books, articles, Wikipedia, posts on the Internet, etc., to function and improve it.
