The success of ChatGPT has taken the topic of artificial intelligence to a whole new level. But what is actually behind the chatbot and how does ChatGPT actually work?
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the talk of the town. Since then, the AI chatbot has not only cracked the one million user mark in no time at all, but has also put the topic of AI in a completely new light.
But what is actually behind the AI chatbot from OpenAI and how does a system like ChatGPT actually work?
What does ChatGPT think about itself?
The acronym ChatGPT stands for “Chatbot Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. On the website of the creators of OpenAI, it says about the system that users can “get instant answers, find creative inspiration and learn something new”. The system describes itself as “a language model called ChatGPT, based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 architecture”.
I was developed by training on a large amount of text data to have human-like conversations and respond to various questions and queries.
The training for the AI software is always considered unfinished. This is because ChatGPT continues to learn from the conversations conducted between chatbot and human.
How does the training for ChatGPT work?
As with a real brain, an artificial intelligence must also be trained with information. The creators of ChatGPT first trained the AI system with existing texts, for example from the internet.
ChatGPT then analysed these. The AI chatbot itself explains that it was thus able to develop “an understanding of language, grammar, context and knowledge”.
With this information as a basis, the system can recognise patterns in texts and thus make predictions about which sentence is likely to come next.
Lifelong learning for AI without personal experience
But with the training from the internet, the learning of artificial intelligence is far from complete. The system learns from every question that users ask the chatbot.
This is the only way ChatGPT can respond to questions with a coherent answer. The AI analyses the question entered and tries to understand it. With the help of the data and patterns already collected, it can then formulate a plausible answer.
How ChatGPT works
The AI points out that it itself has “no actual understanding, awareness or personal experience”. It is merely a tool based on “probabilities and statistics”.
Although I try to provide useful and accurate information, my answers may contain errors or be inaccurate.
Therefore, the chatbot also advises users to check the answers they receive or to consult other sources. This way, users can ensure that they receive “accurate and reliable information”.
