ChatGPT and Beyond: An overview of the growing field of large language models and their use in ophthalmology.

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ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot built on large language models (LLMs), has rapidly gained popularity. The benefits and limitations of this transformative technology have been discussed across various fields, including medicine. The widespread availability of ChatGPT has enabled clinicians to study how these tools could be used for a variety of tasks such as generating differential diagnosis lists, organizing patient notes, and synthesizing literature for scientific research. LLMs have shown promising capabilities in ophthalmology by performing well on the Ophthalmic Knowledge Assessment Program, providing fairly accurate responses to questions about retinal diseases, and in generating differential diagnoses list. There are current limitations to this technology, including the propensity of LLMs to "hallucinate", or confidently generate false information; their potential role in perpetuating biases in medicine; and the challenges in incorporating LLMs into research without allowing "AI-plagiarism" or publication of false information. In this paper, we provide a balanced overview of what LLMs are and introduce some of the LLMs that have been generated in the past few years. We discuss recent literature evaluating the role of these language models in medicine with a focus on ChatGPT. The field of AI is fast-paced, and new applications based on LLMs are being generated rapidly; therefore, it is important for ophthalmologists to be aware of how this technology works and how it may impact patient care. Here, we discuss the benefits, limitations, and future advancements of LLMs in patient care and research.