What kind of AI is ChatGPT?

Sometimes, talking to a machine that responds almost like a human feels a bit like magic. But there’s no magic here—just clever physics and math dressed up as artificial intelligence. Let’s dive into ChatGPT, an AI model developed by OpenAI, and peel back the layers to see what’s going on.

What is ChatGPT?

Let’s start with GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and break it down for better understanding:

• Generative: It creates things—specifically, text.

• Pre-trained: It has been trained on a massive dataset before you even use it.

• Transformer: This is the blueprint for how the model processes information.

Think of GPT as a highly educated guesser. It’s read more text than any human could in a thousand lifetimes and uses that knowledge to predict what word comes next in a sentence. ChatGPT is a version of GPT that’s been fine-tuned for conversation. It’s like GPT’s sociable sibling that’s been taught to generate text and have a dialogue. How does it do this? This depends on two main factors:

Fine-tuning for the conversation

After GPT is pretrained on a vast collection of internet text, it knows a lot but isn’t quite the best conversationalist. To fine-tune it for dialogue, it goes through additional training:

• Specialized training data: The model is trained on datasets that include example dialogues, often provided by human reviewers. These could be real conversation transcripts or ones specifically created for training.

• Supervised fine-tuning: Human AI trainers play both the user and the assistant, guiding the model on appropriate responses. This helps the model learn the nuances of human conversation.

• Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF): Here it gets interesting. The model generates responses, and human reviewers rank them based on quality. These rankings are used to train a reward model, which in turn is used to improve future responses. This process is illustrated in the diagram below

Context awareness

A good conversation isn’t just about responding to the last thing said; it’s about remembering what was said earlier and maintaining coherence throughout the dialogue. ChatGPT achieves this through context awareness. Here’s how the model keeps track:

• Extended context window: ChatGPT can process many tokens (words or pieces of words) at once. This means it can consider the most recent message and several previous exchanges in the conversation.

• Sequential input processing: When interacting with ChatGPT, the entire conversation history is fed into the model each time. This allows it to reference earlier parts of the conversation when generating a response.

• Attention mechanisms: The model utilizes the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer architecture to weigh the importance of different parts of the conversation history. It can focus on relevant details and ignore less important information.

Suppose you start a conversation with ChatGPT:

Even several exchanges later, ChatGPT can remember that you’re interested in Golden Retrievers and tailor its responses accordingly. These enhancements transform ChatGPT from a mere text generator into an interactive assistant capable of:

• Answering follow-up questions: It can handle complex queries that build upon previous interactions.

• Maintaining conversational flow: The dialogue feels more natural, as the model can reference earlier topics and maintain consistency.

• Providing personalized responses: By remembering details you’ve shared, it can offer advice or information tailored to you.

To make interactions even more useful and personalized, ChatGPT includes the following features:

• Custom instructions: You can tell ChatGPT specific details about yourself or how you’d like it to respond. For example, you might set instructions like, “Always explain things in simple terms” or “Please provide responses in bullet points.” These settings apply across future interactions, so you don’t have to repeat them every time.

• Memory: This enables it to better personalize responses based on what it remembers from past interactions. However, this feature comes with considerations around privacy, so users have control over data preferences.

What is a transformer in ChatGPT?

What exactly is this transformer that is the “T” in ChatGPT? The Transformer is like a super-smart reader who understands sentences by looking at all the words simultaneously. It uses a trick called self-attention to figure out which words are most important to each other. Imagine you’re reading the sentence: “The cat, which was sitting on the mat, chased the mouse.” Your brain knows “cat” and “chased” are connected, even though they’re not beside each other. The transformer does the same thing: it scans the whole sentence and picks up on relationships, no matter how far apart the words are.

Older models struggled with this; they processed words individually, easily losing track of context. But the Transformer looks at everything together, letting it keep track of who’s doing what in a sentence. That’s why it’s the “brain” behind ChatGPT, helping it make sense of conversations and predict what comes next.

Conclusion

So, what kind of AI is ChatGPT? In short, it's a conversational AI built on top of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and has been fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to handle dialogues more naturally and provide tailored interactions. However, it's important to remember that ChatGPT is not conscious; it doesn’t "understand" the language like we do. It’s an advanced pattern-recognition machine that uses probabilities to predict the next word in a sentence. While it can mimic understanding and context, it has limitations, like the potential to provide misleading information or respond inconsistently to slight changes in input.

While ChatGPT is incredibly powerful, it's still not at its full potential according to the man who primarily worked on it, but it can be further unleashed with the right prompting techniques. By learning how to structure prompts effectively, you can unlock even more sophisticated and tailored responses from ChatGPT. Interested in diving deeper? We offer several courses on prompt engineering and generative AI to help you get the most out of ChatGPT.