(It’s worth emphasizing that there’s no “theory” being used here it’s just a matter of what’s been found to work in practice. And, in keeping with the idea of voodoo, there’s a particular so-called “temperature” parameter that determines how often lower-ranked words will be used, and for essay generation, it turns out that a “temperature” of 0.8 seems best. The fact that there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time. But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a “more interesting” essay. Because for some reason-that maybe one day we’ll have a scientific-style understanding of-if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very “flat” essay, that never seems to “show any creativity” (and even sometimes repeats word for word). But this is where a bit of voodoo begins to creep in. the one to which the highest “probability” was assigned). But which one should it actually pick to add to the essay (or whatever) that it’s writing? One might think it should be the “highest-ranked” word (i.e. (More precisely, as I’ll explain, it’s adding a “token”, which could be just a part of a word, which is why it can sometimes “make up new words”.)īut, OK, at each step it gets a list of words with probabilities. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with “probabilities”:Īnd the remarkable thing is that when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”-and each time adding a word. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”.

Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text-then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. So let’s say we’ve got the text “ The best thing about AI is its ability to”.

The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” (And the essence of what I’ll say applies just as well to other current “large language models” as to ChatGPT.) I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus on the big picture of what’s going on-and while I’ll mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply into them. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT-and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. A discussion about the history of neural nets »

Random element synonym