ChatGPT is a language model created by OpenAI that can carry on conversations, answer questions, and summarize text through natural language generation. It was trained on a large dataset of conversational text from various online sources to understand and generate human-like responses. While ChatGPT can perform tasks like translation, conversation, and summarization, it also has limitations since it may demonstrate biases from its training data and lacks full human-level context and common sense understanding. Users can get started with ChatGPT by signing up on the website and exploring example queries to learn its capabilities and functionality.