From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed he world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company OpenAI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the Unlversity of Minnesota, US.
The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics and write essays, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a large corpus (语料库) of text data.
What makes ChatGPT so impressive? As Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI said n an interview, "It's not actually a fundamentally new technology that made this (ChatGPT) have a moment." According to MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, a large language model. Because texts are more complex than the meaning of every word combined, language models require a type of neural network (神经网络) that can make sense of texts.
One breakthrough behind today's model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017. The neural network can infer word meanings by tracking where the word appears in a sentence. Transformer can therefore gather the meaning of texts more accurately.
The GPT models were built by OpenAI combined Transformer with unsupervised (无人指导的) learning, meaning that the models can learn by themselves without being told what to look at. ChatGPT can now generate human-like responses instantly due to the large scale (规模) of texts It made sense of and learned from.
"One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with falsities," Michael Wooldridge at the Alan Turing Institute in London, UK. This means that ChatGPT doesn't know the truth about the world — it learns information from various resources but It cannot decide what is true or false. As for education, many US schools recently banned students from using ChatGPT on school networks because students began to use it as a shortcut for essays.
