Ask HN: How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is really very simple. Imagine you could analyze a million books and identify all the words within them -- not the meanings of the words, just the actual letters they contain.<p>Now, when someone asks you about the history of France (or why the sky is blue), you could simply pluck out of your library the most common strings of word that seem to follow the words that were in your question!<p>It&#x27;s like a kid in the 80&#x27;s who thinks the answer to an essay question is to copy it from an encyclopedia, only the &quot;encyclopedia&quot; is very large and contains multiple sources.<p>So, the big take away needs to be that there is absolutely no understanding, no cognizance of any kind, no language comprehension going on. The answers look good because they contain all the same words as the most popular answers people have already written which the system scanned.<p>So ChatGPT turns out to great for parsing and summarizing documents, if that&#x27;s something you need. But, since it doesn&#x27;t know fact from fiction, it cannot apply logic or math, and it cannot perform reasoning or analysis, it&#x27;s not good for finding out facts or discerning truth.<p>Another great failing of LLM software is that the user being spoken to is generic. The answers are not modeled for you, they&#x27;re the same models for everyone. But a human teacher does their job by being exactly the opposite of this -- someone who is finely tuned to the needs and understandings of their audience. A good journalist or writer does the same.