[TowerTalk] ChatGPT

[Christian Kennedy]

On 4/5/23 12:53, John Webster NN1SS wrote:
> Is anyone here using ChatGPT in the context of amateur radio? Potential use
> cases would be design of antennas and tower installations, software code
> generation, problem solving, etc. If so, what do you do with it?

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.

-- 
Christian Kennedy, Ph.D.
chris at af6ap.com	AF6AP | DB00000692 | PG00029419
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