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Re: [TowerTalk] ChatGPT

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] ChatGPT
From: David Gilbert <ab7echo@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 16:31:37 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
Yup.

73,
Dave  AB7E


On 4/5/2023 4:20 PM, Christian Kennedy wrote:
It's probably useful to recall what the "GPT" in ChatGPT stands for -- 
Generative Pretrained Transformer; GPTs are a particularly effective  
form of long-term memory that's useful for making predictions 
regarding patterns.  ChatGPT has zero semantic knowledge; in essence 
it's a text prediction engine that's been trained on a massive corpus 
of text (apparently including code scraped off of github); what it 
pukes out in response to your input text is, literally the 
statistically most probable outcome based on the sequence of tokens 
that it produced by shredding your input text.  Of course if that's 
all it did the results would be both dry and deterministic, so GPTs 
incorporate the notion of "temperature"; at any given point in 
constructing an output string it has a list of candidate words based 
on what it's already output, ranked by probability, but then it 
perturbs the probability so it doesn't always produce the same text.  
Because each output token affects the probability of what comes next, 
the result is different (occasionally very different) output strings 
for the same input.
GPTs can be entertaining, and for narrow domains can be useful, but as 
autocomplete systems with zero understanding of what they're spewing, 
they can also be thought of as incredible bullshit generators.  Worse, 
their predictions become part of their corpus, and competing GPT 
systems have started scraping each other, resulting in a sort of 
exponential bullshit amplification phenomena that has required some 
tamping down.
My suggesting is that you use it to get into the game, but always go 
back to primary sources and do your own work.
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