  Given the growing importance of AI literacy, we decided to write this
tutorial to help narrow the gap between the discourse among those who study
language models -- the core technology underlying ChatGPT and similar products
-- and those who are intrigued and want to learn more about them. In short, we
believe the perspective of researchers and educators can add some clarity to
the public's understanding of the technologies beyond what's currently
available, which tends to be either extremely technical or promotional material
generated about products by their purveyors.
  Our approach teases apart the concept of a language model from products built
on them, from the behaviors attributed to or desired from those products, and
from claims about similarity to human cognition. As a starting point, we (1)
offer a scientific viewpoint that focuses on questions amenable to study
through experimentation; (2) situate language models as they are today in the
context of the research that led to their development; and (3) describe the
boundaries of what is known about the models at this writing.

Computation and Language;Artificial Intelligence;Computers and Society;Machine Learning