THis post was generated by ChatGPT based on the Gardian Article - Enjoy!
n November 2021, OpenAI, a research laboratory in California, launched ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) program that has taken the world by storm. Essentially a souped-up chatbot, ChatGPT can answer the biggest and smallest questions in life, and even generate college essays, fictional stories, haikus, and job application letters. This is all possible thanks to the vast amount of text on the internet that ChatGPT has gleaned from, with careful guidance from human experts.
ChatGPT is based on an earlier AI from OpenAI called GPT-3, also known as a large language model (LLM). The program is fed hundreds of billions of words in the form of books, conversations and web articles, from which it builds a model, based on statistical probability, of the words and sentences that tend to follow whatever text came before. It is a bit like predictive text on a mobile phone, but scaled up massively, allowing it to produce entire responses instead of single words.
The significant step forward with ChatGPT lies in the extra training it received. The initial language model was fine-tuned by feeding it a vast number of questions and answers provided by human AI trainers. These were then incorporated into its dataset. Next, the program was asked to produce several different responses to a wide variety of questions, which human experts then ranked from best to worst. This human-guided fine-tuning means ChatGPT is often highly impressive at working out what information a question is really after, gathering the right information, and framing a response in a natural manner.
The result, according to Elon Musk, is “scary good”, as many early users – including college students who see it as a saviour for late assignments – will attest. It is also harder to corrupt than earlier chatbots. Unlike older chatbots, ChatGPT has been designed to refuse inappropriate questions and to avoid making stuff up by churning out responses on issues it has not been trained on. For example, ChatGPT knows nothing in the world post-2021 as its data has not been updated since then.
However, ChatGPT does have limitations. It has no handle on the truth, so even when answers are fluent and plausible, there is no guarantee they are correct. As OpenAI notes: “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers” and “will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behaviour.” It can also give long-winded replies, a problem its developers put down to trainers “preferring long answers that look more comprehensive”.
In conclusion, ChatGPT is a powerful AI program that can answer questions and generate text with impressive accuracy and fluency. However, it is important to remember that it has limitations and should not be trusted for giving the truth. It is a tool that can be used to help with specific tasks, but it should always be used with caution and the information provided should be verified.
“These are the first systems that I can genuinely get excited about. It would take 1,000 human lifetimes to read the amount of text the system was trained on and hidden away in all of that text is an awful lot of knowledge about the world.”
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