Even though lots of people know about ChatGPT, not many can tell you what the letters “GPT” really stand for without having to think hard. It’s actually short for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.”
So, OpenAI is the brain behind ChatGPT โ it’s like a computer program that uses super-smart artificial intelligence (AI) to have text chats with people like you and me. You can throw any reasonable question or request its way, and ChatGPT will fire back with a bunch of text that can sound supernatural, almost like a human.
If we get a bit more technical, ChatGPT is a kind of big language model-based chatbot. What that means is that it gets fed tons and tons of text-based info โ like books, news stories, and web pages โ and it learns how to put sentences together in a way that sounds like it’s been reading stuff forever.
The cool part? It’s not just a one-trick pony. It can do all sorts of stuff! It can help write computer code, act like a virtual assistant chat buddy, make content, and it’s even tried its hand at writing news articles (with mixed results, though).
Now, this is where the fun irony kicks in. We actually got ChatGPT to explain what “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” means. And here’s what it told us:
So, “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” is a fancy way of saying what makes this language model tick. Let’s break it down:
- Generative: In the world of language and how computers understand it, “generative” is like a magic trick. It means the model can whip up brand-new text that looks and sounds a lot like something a human would say. It’s like the model can make up sentences, paragraphs, and even whole chunks of text that fit right in thanks to all the patterns it picked up while learning.
- Pre-trained: Picture this โ before the real show begins, there’s a rehearsal. Well, “pre-training” is like that rehearsal for ChatGPT. It practices on a massive pile of text from all over the place โ the internet, books, and more. During this training phase, the model learns how words follow each other, and it gets really good at guessing what words come next. This lets it understand the patterns and connections in the text.
- Transformer: Now, a “Transformer” isn’t a robot in disguise, but it’s a special kind of tech from a smart paper written by Vaswani and the gang back in 2017. This tech lets the model process a bunch of words all at once, sort of like juggling words in the air. And it doesn’t just jumble them โ it figures out which words are super important and which are just background noise. This helps when the model cooks up new text. People love Transformers for their power to handle long strings of words and do a bunch of things at the same time.
Pretty cool, right? ChatGPT, you’re quite the wordsmith. Just don’t snatch my job away, okay?
And guess what? There’s more to the GPT family. Apart from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there are some other GPTs roaming around. There’s BloombergGPT, which uses similar brainy AI stuff to ChatGPT, but it’s all about money and finance. Then there’s GPT-Neo, kind of like a cousin to OpenAI’s GPT-3, but with its own open-source flair.
Right now, OpenAI and ChatGPT are like the rockstars of the “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” universe. But don’t blink, because other companies are out there in the race too.
Just a quick heads-up: these “explainer” articles are double-checked by fact-checkers to make sure they’re right when they’re published. The words, pictures, and links might get changed later on to keep everything up to date.
