ChatGPT just received its biggest update yet: Custom GPT bots. A step-by-step tutorial to setup your research assistant in 15 minutes: 👇

CustomGPT is giving ChatGPT background knowledge and instructions what it should do. I gave it a PDF of my research notes so it can understand my domain and wrote down exactly what it should do. The result is a bot that scans papers for relevance based on my research questions

1. Create your custom bot In ChatGPT Ccick on your login icon then on "My GPTs" In the next window select "Create a GPT". You will need a premium account for this.

2. Two modes You can use ChatGPT itself to specify your bot. It is not very precise but easy. If you play around the first time try this mode. Then click on Configure to start editing your instructions and background knowledge directly.

3. Upload background knowledge I have a digital note on "Range Dynamics": My research topic. I export it as a PDF and upload it to ChatGPT. If you don't have notes you can use an introduction in a recent review as well.

AI will not be able to access your old notebooks. If you want to be part of the AI revolution start taking digital notes today! If you ant some help with this, check out my upcoming webinar:

4. Instructions This is the part where you will be experimenting until the result suits you. I start with creating a persona that defines how the bot will interact. It is the easiest way to get tone, intentions and background for ChatGPT.

4b. Research Questions Since I want to analyze papers according to my research interests the bot must know what is relevant to my research. The easiest way is to provide it with the research questions I am working on. (Also mostly copy and pasted from my digital notes)

4c. Task Tell the bot exactly what it should do. I want it to extract the strength, weaknesses and unique contribution of the papers and contrast it with my research questions. (It took some experimenting to get it to a point where the results became very useful. Be patient.)

5. Iterate your instructions Setting up the bot takes no time but experimenting took me about 1.5 hours. As you can see in the image the initial results weren't as great. Take your time to experiment with different instructions. You only have to do it once!

6. Share and use your bot Your bot will now appear in your main ChatGPT window. Whenever you click on it you have a conversation with this bot and not with "vanilla ChatGPT". Notice that I only uploaded a paper, no instructions and the bot already knows what to do!

CustomGPT Bots are even more powerful than this. They can browse the internet and connect to any web service to send emails, order pizza or check the weather. In the future these bots likely will be as ubiquitous as Google in our life.

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