What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
writings.stephenwolfram.com
What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
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Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#2This is a terrific deep-dive from Stephen Wolfram that explains not only how ChatGPT and other LLM applications work "under the hood," but also how they can give rise to logic and grammar -- but notably not math or computation.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#3[deleted]
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#4Please add 2023 tag to the title.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#5The better the models get, the harder it is for me to form a mental model of what goes on inside of them.
An example of a prompt for which I don't have a good mental model why it works:
What do you think about the following text?
Joe drove Sue to university. Afterwards he drove home again
and drank a tea with her in the kitchen.
GPT-4o for example:
There is a slight inconsistency in the narrative.
The text states that Joe drank tea with Sue in the
kitchen after driving her to university, which
implies that Sue is at home, contradicting the
earlier statement that she was driven to university.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#6Excellent deep dive (and surprisingly not self-referential). I read the dead tree version (https://amzn.to/4cs5EDA) when it first came out.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#7This is a terrific deep-dive from Stephen Wolfram that explains not only how ChatGPT and other LLM applications work "under the hood," but also how they can give rise to logic and grammar -- but notably not math or computation.
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Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#8The better the models get, the harder it is for me to form a mental model of what goes on inside of them. An example of a prompt for which I don't have a good mental model why it works: What do you think about the following text? Joe drove Sue to university. Afterwards he drove home again and drank a tea with her in the kitchen. Older models behaved similar to Markov chains and completely missed that something is log…
My guess is that this is a post training (rlhf) artifact on world model prompts. There were likely many “logical inconsistency” prompts which humans coerced to the above response.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#9The better the models get, the harder it is for me to form a mental model of what goes on inside of them. An example of a prompt for which I don't have a good mental model why it works: What do you think about the following text? Joe drove Sue to university. Afterwards he drove home again and drank a tea with her in the kitchen. Older models behaved similar to Markov chains and completely missed that something is log…
That is one version of implication.
The implication could also be that a time component isn't stated explicitly.
He drove her to university. Time passes. Now it's "afterwards" and Sue is done with her classes and they go back home to drink tea.
For all we know Joe had a cup of coffee while she was writing an exam but because they live so far from university it made no sense to go home and come back to come pick her up as it might take an hour to drive each way and the exam was 2 hours.
Re: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
#10Excellent deep dive (and surprisingly not self-referential). I read the dead tree version ( https://amzn.to/4cs5EDA ) when it first came out.
You're right! I'm used to his articles being full of self promotion and Wolfram-talk, but this one is not.