Meet Lance Junck, a 23-year-old with no technical training who made $35,000 in 3 months teaching ChatGPT to beginners
Daniel Levi
Posted On April 18, 2023
The AI Gold Rush is here and everyone wants a piece of it. Although AI has been around for many years, it wasn’t until November of last year that it got mainstream attention with the launch of the popular OpenAI chatbot, ChatGPT.
Just five days after its launch, ChatGPT crossed one million users. To put that in perspective, it took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months, Spotify 5 months, and Instagram 2.5 months to reach the one million users mark. It took about nine months after its global launch for the popular short video app TikTok to add 100 million users. That’s not all. In two months after its launch in November 2022 by OpenAI, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
As ChatGPT soars in popularity so is the number of people including workers and students turning to the new OpenAI chatbot turning to make their job easier. It didn’t take long before Lance Junck saw an opportunity to not only help learn how to use the ChatGPT but also make some cash from it. However, what makes the story of Junck unique is the fact that the 23-year-old did not have any technical experience. Which, if you think about it, is actually better. Today, the guy is raking in tens of thousands of dollars teaching people how.
It all started in late December when the 23-year-old Junck launched an online course on the education platform Udemy that teaches people to use ChatGPT.
Within three months, Junck, who has no formal AI training, has enrolled more than 15,000 students from around the world in his “ChatGPT Masterclass: A Complete ChatGPT Guide for Beginners.” Junck charges $19.99 per course and even offers a 25% discount which brings the price down to just $14.99 per student. In just a few months, Junck is raked in $34,913 in profits, according to screenshots of his sales dashboard reviewed by Business Insider.
The full-time brand strategist based in Austin was amazed by the impressive generative capabilities of ChatGPT when he first used it in November. He saw an opportunity to make the bot available to everyone and decided to create an online course to teach people how to use the tool, according to Junck.
“There is an incredible learning curve to ChatGPT,” he said. “I think people are kind of afraid of ChatGPT, so I tried to make it warm and exciting and approachable.”
ChatGPT Masterclass
According to his Udemy’s course page, Junck course covers everything beginners and experts needs to be proficient in ChatGPT. The course includes:
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How to create SEO, E-commerce, translation, Amazon, and sales-copy using ChatGPT
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How to give ChatGPT access to information from 2023 and bypass its limits on indexed information
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How to quickly craft podcasts and other long-form content using ChatGPT
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How students can use ChatGPT to breeze through coursework and create powerpoint presentations in seconds
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How to build a website and create landing pages/sales funnels using ChatGPT
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Produce high quality ChatGPT text faster with our pro-tips on prompt design and pro-tips for ChatGPT usage
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Techniques for using ChatGPT to create personalized, profitable, and engaging Youtube content
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Use ChatGPT even when it’s at capacity without paying for ChatGPT Plus
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How to create high quality images using Dalle
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Create code and apps using the open api of OpenAI
Junck told Business Insider that he’s self-taught. “He said he spends hours on the bot every day, asking it to do things like write an introduction to a novel or product descriptions for certain foods to better understand how to prompt the bot,” Business Insider wrote.
To stay on top of things, Junck said he consumes “every piece of ChatGPT content” on the internet, including articles and posts on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Reddit.
He admitted in his interview with Business Insider that he’s had doubts around whether the course would sell. He said he’s wondered whether there’s “some kid at Cornell getting his PhD in large language models” teaching ChatGPT that would “blow me out of the water.”
You can checkout his course here at Udemy.
ChatGPT is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a type of large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI with support for up to 175 billion parameters. It is a neural network-based model that is trained to generate human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence based on the words that come before it. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools use the LLM technique to generate text in a chat-like or conversational style.
In March, OpenAI launched GPT-4 with better accuracy. Unlike its predecessors, OpenAI said the new GPT-4 is a large multimodal model that can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, adding that GPT-4 is the company’s most advanced system to date, producing safer and more useful responses.
Thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem-solving abilities, the Microsoft-backed AI startup said the new GPT-4 exhibits “human-level performance” on many professional tests. In one test, OpenAI claimed that GPT-4 performed at the 90th percentile on a simulated bar exam, the 89th percentile on the SAT Math exam, and the 93rd percentile on an SAT reading exam.
