“ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, generates human-like text with high fluency and coherence, potentially revolutionizing various industries.” - ChatGPT
One of the most influential technological highlights of 2022 was OpenAI’s release of their large language model, ChatGPT, which was made available to the public in November of last year. It instantly went viral on the internet and has given the masses a glimpse of what the technology of the future holds. ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, which is a type of large language model.
Although many people have heard about ChatGPT, not many people know what a feat it truly is. Most people use it for fun antics, which, admittedly, it excels at — exemplified by how it can write your science lab report in the style of a rap song from the early 2000s.
“Listen up y'all, it's time to learn
A physics lesson that'll make your head turn
Newton's second law, it's the key
To understanding motion and energy” - ChatGPT
While people know about the ease of talking to ChatGPT, not many people know how it actually works. The idea of a Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer can be explained by the three parts of the name. The generative part simply means that this AI has the ability to generate new text. However, The pre-trained part is not as simple and is the part of the model that takes the most time to create. A pre-trained AI is an AI that is given a large amount of human-written text, in Chat GPT’s case, over 8 million documents of various writing styles and 10 billion words. The exposure of different styles of text is very important, as it allows Chat GPT to write with different styles, enabling it to write the amazing physics song above. It then analyzes the text and learns the rules of the human language by using a method called backpropagation.
At first, the idea of backpropagation was too complex for me, but thanks to ChatGPT explaining it to me like I was ten, it actually is not very complicated. I’ll spare you the time of creating an OpenAI account to explain what backpropagation is with a quote from ChatGPT. Chat GPT compares it to a teacher grading a student’s test where “The teacher compares the student's answers to the correct answers and gives feedback. If the student got a question wrong, the teacher points out where the student went wrong and gives guidance on how to do better next time.” In this example, the student is ChatGPT’s neural network (basically its brain), and the teacher is the actual text. However, ChatGPT is not actually taking a test, instead, it was being trained with a method called autoregression, where it would have to predict the next word in a sentence based on the previous words.
The transformer part of the name is just the type of computer system used to generate the text. This model was introduced in 2017 by Google researchers and is used for question-answering and text summarization.
One of the most intriguing parts of ChatGPT is its ability to write long essays with cited works in a matter of minutes, which are mostly undetectable by plagiarism checkers. While this might cause significant trouble in many schools around the world, NYU Steinhardt is thinking about how AI can be incorporated into its curriculum. However, many think ChatGPT imposes a threat to the education system, causing it to be banned in all NYC schools. OpenAI is against the misuse of ChatGPT in schools, saying “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else”. It poses the question, how do we integrate AI into society without removing the necessary human skill of writing?
This question is already being answered, specifically by Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton College. He did this by writing the program GPtZero, an AI built to detect AI writing patterns. It can detect an AI by measuring the perplexity of a sentence, or how different the next word is based on the predicted outcome from the previous words. The lower the perplexity, the more likely it is to be written by an AI. GPTZero also instantly blew up on the internet, as many schools have used the product to check their student’s work.
ChatGPT is only one of many publicly available AI language model’s out there, and the massive release of this new technology is just showing how important it will become in the future. This will and already has changed numerous careers, being used by some CEOs along with roughly 30% of U.S. professionals. However, AI is still in its early stages, so for now, people don’t need to worry about their jobs.
ChatGPT is one of the most impactful technological advancements of the past year. Due to it being easy to use, and its ability to write various styles, including long essays and even rap songs, it has blown up all over the internet. ChatGPT and AI language models are a sneak peek into the future regarding how work might be done, whether that’s typing a prompt into a chatbot, or writing the first sentence of an essay and having the rest be written for you. While AI is still in its early stages, it will become an essential part of life and it's important for society to think about how it will be used in life, without removing the value of human skills.