ChatGPT is like an intern

May 31, 2023

Introduction

ChatGPT has been one of the fastest adopted technology products in the world, gaining over 100 million users just 2 months after it was released. You’ve probably seen screenshots of people using it, and the odds are very good you’ve read some of its work without even realizing it. It’s capable of incredible things.

It also has downsides if you use it incorrectly, like the lawyer who submitted a brief sourced by ChatGPT. To understand why it does this, we must dive into a few of the details about ChatGPT’s inner workings.

How does it work?

First, ChatGPT has no concept of fact or truth. The core system works by looking at whatever context you provide it, and it starts a loop where it tries to predict the next best word that fits the context you gave it and the words it is generating. If you fed “I love” to the base model, it would likely output “you”, for example. The words themselves come from the data ChatGPT was trained on: curated parts of the internet (Common Crawl, WebText2, Wikipedia, etc).