I hear people saying things like “chatgpt is basically just a fancy predictive text”. I’m certainly not in the “it’s sentient!” camp, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot more is going on than just predicting the most likely next word.
Even if it’s predicting word by word within a bunch of constraints & structures inferred from the question / prompt, then that’s pretty interesting. Tbh, I’m more impressed by chatgpt’s ability to appearing to “understand” my prompts than I am by the quality of the output. Even though it’s writing is generally a mix of bland, obvious and inaccurate, it mostly does provide a plausible response to whatever I’ve asked / said.
Anyone feel like providing an ELI5 explanation of how it works? Or any good links to articles / videos?
It is literally the same exact kind of algorithm that predicts the next word you will type on your phone based on what’s already been typed. The differences are that it has a much larger training dataset, which means more accurate predictions, it processes based on the entire body of text that has already been given (including the hidden prompt and previous messages), and that it doesn’t always predict whole words, but instead clusters of characters.
If you want a more general overview of how machine learning works in general, this is a good video series to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk
If you want to see some evidence that it doesn’t truly understand what it says, try having it generate and explain some jokes or riddles that rely on wordplay. It will completely shatter the illusion.