I hear people saying things like “chatgpt is basically just a fancy predictive text”. I’m certainly not in the “it’s sentient!” camp, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot more is going on than just predicting the most likely next word.
Even if it’s predicting word by word within a bunch of constraints & structures inferred from the question / prompt, then that’s pretty interesting. Tbh, I’m more impressed by chatgpt’s ability to appearing to “understand” my prompts than I am by the quality of the output. Even though it’s writing is generally a mix of bland, obvious and inaccurate, it mostly does provide a plausible response to whatever I’ve asked / said.
Anyone feel like providing an ELI5 explanation of how it works? Or any good links to articles / videos?
The magic sauce is context length within reasonable compute restraints. Phone predictive text has a context length of like 2-3 words, ChatGPT (and other LLMs) have figured out how to do predictions on thousands or tens of thousands of words of context at a time.
It’s that why is compute heavy ?
Correct, and the massive databases of long-length context associations are why you need tens to hundreds of gigabytes worth of ram/vram. Disk would be too slow