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Simply explained: How does GPT work?

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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#11

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

Care to post a full example ?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#12

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

I've started to suspect that generating code is actually one of the easier things for a predictive text completion model to achieve.

Programming languages are a whole lot more structured and predictable than human language.

In JavaScript the only token that ever comes after "if " is "(" for example.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#13

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

What’s novel to you could be just trained material

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#14

This article seems credible and actually made me feel as if I understood it, i.e. at some depth but not deeper than a relative layperson can grasp. What I can't understand is how the Bing chatbot can give me accurate links to sources but chatGPT4 on request gives me nonsensical URLs in 4 case of 5. It doesn't matter in the cases where I ask it to write a program: the verification is in the running of it. But to have…

> What I can't understand is how the Bing chatbot can give me accurate links to sources but chatGPT4 on request gives me nonsensical URLs in 4 case of 5

The bing version might run a bing query, fetch the X top pages, run GPT on it, return a response based on what it read, and in the back assign the summary to the source

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#15
post #11

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

Care to post a full example ?

I used GPT-4 to build this tool https://image-to-jpeg.vercel.app using a few prompts the other day - my ChatGPT transcript for that is here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/66918b6cde1f87bf4fc883c677351...

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#16
post #12

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

I've started to suspect that generating code is actually one of the easier things for a predictive text completion model to achieve. Programming languages are a whole lot more structured and predictable than human language. In JavaScript the only token that ever comes after "if " is "(" for example.

This!

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#17
This is confusing, using the semantic vectors arithmetic of embeddings is not very relevant to transformers and its completely missing the word 'attention'. I don't think transformers are that difficult to explain to people , but it is hard to explain "why" they work. But i think it's important for everyone to look under the hood and know that there are no demons underneath.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#18
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to post a full example ?

I used GPT-4 to build this tool https://image-to-jpeg.vercel.app using a few prompts the other day - my ChatGPT transcript for that is here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/66918b6cde1f87bf4fc883c677351...

Love how you didn’t care about styling this like at all, Lol. Btw, if you ask gpt to make it presentable by using bootstrap 5 for example it can style it for you

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#19

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

To be deliberately unfair, imagine a huge if-else block — like, a few billion entries big — and each branch played out a carefully chosen and well-written string of text.

It would convince a lot of people with the breadth, despite not really having much depth.

The real GPT model is much deeper than that, of course, but my toy example should at least give a vibe for why even a simple thing might still feel extraordinary.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#20
Is it possible that we don’t truly know how it works? That there is some emergent behavior inside these models that we’ve created but not yet properly described? I’ve read a few of these articles but I’m still not completely satisfied.
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