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?
Yep, this is a very good explanation. Seeing ChatGPT “talk” is immediately associated with sentience, because for your entire life, and millions of years of evolution, apeech was in 99.9% of cases, a sign of aentience. So your brain doesn’t even consider it a question, until you consciously stop to think about it.
An interesting way to antromorphizise GPT that’s still technically correct is to think of it as having essentially perfect memory. So it doesn’t know how to talk, but it has seen so many conversations (literal trillions) that it can recognize the patterns that make up speech and simply “remember” what the most likely combination of words is, given the context, with zero actual “understanding” of language. (Human trainers then fine-tune these guesses to give you the ChatGPT experience)
ChatGPT also fudges “memory” by feeding in all previous prompts (up to a token limit) with whatever you’ve said latest, which improves the pattern matching.