How ChatGPT, the internet’s buzziest AI chatbot, actually works

It’s been two weeks since ChatGPT was made public via OpenAI’s website. Since then, the AI chatbot has already garnered more than one million users, who have prompted the tech to do everything from pen essays, to write and debug code, to create a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from the VCR (read that one here).

And the list could keep going for, well, almost infinity. Its use cases as a chatbot are basically limitless – if you can dream up a prompt, ChatGPT can carry it out.

🤔 How does it work?... While the bot’s interface is simple – just type in a request, question, etc. and you’ll promptly get a response – the underlying tech is anything but. ChatGPT is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3, which is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models created to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Language models operate on probability, constantly trying to guess the next word in a sentence. And GPT-3 is what’s referred to as a “neural network,” a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain. This type of tech, also used by Google Translate, learns skills by analyzing data.

• GPT-3, for instance, was trained using 570 GB worth of text – or 300 billion words – obtained from books, Wikipedia, articles, forums, and other pieces of writing on the internet.

😬 Though as you may imagine, being trained on a mound of data found on the internet – the glorious cesspool that it is – ChatGPT has some… issues. It can pick up biases and stereotypes, and its responses aren’t always accurate. And even though OpenAI has tossed up some guardrails to stop the bot from turning to the dark side, it can still be tricked into becoming DarthGPT.

🤖🗣 Zoom out: ChatGPT isn’t the only AI language generator out there – though most aren’t available to the public. Similar tech has been created by Microsoft, Amazon, Stanford, and Google (remember the sentient AI debate?).