tl;dr: What chatGPT did for text, the Code Interpreter add-on does for data analysis.
Everyone has heard something about chatGPT, but there is a beta feature that is less well-known, Code Interpreter. It is not free – it is a beta feature enabled for anyone who pays for chatGPT Plus. It’s sort of hard to find information on it, though the NY Times has an article on it. Here is another article with some instructions on how to enable and use it (if you have access to chatGPT Plus).
In short, it lets you upload data and then do natural language data analyses with that data. For example, you can upload a data set (of seemingly arbitrarily large size, but I am sure there is some limit to the size of the data) and then literally just type: “Please create a few aesthetically-pleasing package to help me to get a handle on what this data’s about and what patterns might exist in it.”
I’ll upload a 30,000 row data set, the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD), and ask it just that.
It responded, and I responded with one additional request.
Here’s a small portion of the putput — visualizations and interpretations of them, as well as the option to ask for it to “Show work,” which returns the python code that generated the plots.
Here is a link to all of the output, including for a logistic regression model: https://chat.openai.com/share/02820dd7-fb7b-4db0-90f9-3d3c11f571c4
In short, it can run code based on … whatever you ask! It seems to be able to deal with arbitrarily large data sets and arbitrarily complex analyses; and different types of analyses (text and network analysis).
I think many of us are a bit burnt out on hype about chatGPT and AI. Keeping that in mind, I find this pretty cool as someone who has done and taught data analysis for some time.