Artificial intelligence has long ceased to be science fiction. Today, it writes texts, draws pictures, composes music, and even helps write code. One of the most striking examples of such technology is ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI. But how does it actually work? Let’s figure it out as simply as possible.
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What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a large language model. Its main task is to understand and generate human speech. It can maintain a dialogue, answer questions, explain complex things, and even joke. But at the same time, it is not a person or a conscious intelligence, but a set of mathematical algorithms trained on a huge number of texts.
What does “language model” mean?
Simply put, a language model is a program that predicts the next word in a sentence based on the previous words. For example, if you say, “I’m going to…”, the model will guess that the next word might be “shop”, “school”, or “park”. It chooses the most likely option – and builds entire paragraphs of text this way.
What are these models trained on?
ChatGPT was trained on huge volumes of text: books, articles, websites, dialogues, codes, and much more. All this is necessary for the model to “see” as many language patterns, topics, wording, and communication styles as possible.
It’s important to understand: it doesn’t remember texts like a person. Instead, it calculates patterns. It doesn’t “know” that the Earth is round – it just “saw” that such a statement is common, and reproduces it as a logical answer.
What’s inside ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. It’s a complex neural network, but you don’t have to delve into the technical details to understand the main point.
Generative — it can generate text.
Pre-trained — first it is trained on a large amount of data, and then further trained for specific tasks.
Transformer — a type of neural network that can analyze context. That is, understand not just individual words, but the meaning of entire phrases and paragraphs.
It is transformers that made it possible for ChatGPT to support a coherent and logical dialogue.
How does a conversation with ChatGPT happen?
When you write a message, it turns into a set of numbers — the so-called tokens. These tokens are fed to the model, which “thinks about” them (in fact, runs them through many layers of the neural network), and then gives a response, again in the form of tokens. These tokens are translated back into the text that you read.
