What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work? Quotes

“When we make a neural net to distinguish cats from dogs we don’t effectively have to write a program that (say) explicitly finds whiskers; instead we just show lots of examples of what’s a cat and what’s a dog”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“also do this for sequences of words, or indeed whole blocks of text.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“much like for humans, if you tell it something bizarre and unexpected that completely doesn’t fit into the framework it knows, it doesn’t seem like it’ll successfully be able to “integrate” this. It can “integrate” it only if it’s basically riding in a fairly simple way on top of the framework it already has.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“But there’s something potentially confusing about all of this. In the past there were plenty of tasks—including writing essays—that we’ve assumed were somehow “fundamentally too hard” for computers. And now that we see them done by the likes of ChatGPT we tend to suddenly think that computers must have become vastly more powerful—in particular surpassing things they were already basically able to do (like progressively computing the behavior of computational systems like cellular automata). But this isn’t the right conclusion to draw. Computationally irreducible processes are still computationally irreducible, and are still fundamentally hard for computers—even if computers can readily compute their individual steps. And instead what we should conclude is that tasks—like writing essays—that we humans could do, but we didn’t think computers could do, are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought. In other words, the reason a neural net can be successful in writing an essay is because writing an essay turns out to be a “computationally shallower” problem than we thought. And in a sense this takes us closer to “having a theory” of how we humans manage to do things like writing essays, or in general deal with language.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“Not surprisingly, this is nonsense.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“(As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I’ve written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I’ve spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I’ll train a bot from all of that.)”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“So what can we do? The big idea is to make a model that lets us estimate the probabilities with which sequences should occur—even though we’ve never explicitly seen those sequences in the corpus of text we’ve looked at. And at the core of ChatGPT is precisely a so-called “large language model” (LLM) that’s been built to do a good job of estimating those probabilities.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” So”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

“This short book is an attempt to explain from first principles how and why ChatGPT works. In some ways it’s a story about technology. But it’s also a story about science.”
― Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?