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?
Weighting and bias are based on the training dataset. And the training dataset of ChatGPT is mostly internet content, literature, social media discussions, articles, etc.
So the inherent biases are going to be limited in the same way. For example, ChatGPT is not good at generating or interpreting code written in Malbolge, despite the fact that this language is meant to be relatively easy to understand for a machine yet difficult for a human to understand. Because it isn’t processing like a machine, it is processing text like a person.
It also is bad at understanding wordplay like puns since wordplay requires a simultaneous understanding of the meaning of a word as well as the linguistics that underly that word. It is decent at generating puns which already exist and are out in the world, but it can’t creatively generate new ones or interpret novel puns or other wordplay, since that would require a deeper understanding of the language.
Looking at the things it is bad at can give a great insight into its limitations, and in turn into how it works.