by Charles Miller

This week someone on the street stopped me to ask "What is this ChatGPT thing you and Dr. David keep writing about in the Sunday Magazine?" Silently, I thought "Eureka, I have found one of the only people left on earth who has not heard of ChatGPT!" So to this reader, thank you for helping me better understand what needs to be explained.

ChatGPT is a computer program. It is only accessible online using your web browser. It has an app for smart phones and a program for Mac/Windows computers. It may be used so long as your device is online. There is not an offline version of ChatGPT. This program was developed by OpenAI, Inc. which is a California company operating both as a non-profit and a for-profit subsidiary.

First made available to the general public in November 2022, ChatGPT instantly became a sensation, capturing the interest and imagination of people across the world, making it the fastest-adopted computer program in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months. For perspective; it took ChatGPT five days to acquire one million users while it had taken Netflix more than three years to reach its first one million users.

The "GPT" in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The foundation on which the program works is the Large Language Model (LLM), a computer algorithm that processes natural language inputs and predicts the next word based on what it has already seen. It then predicts the next word, and the next word, and so on until its answer is complete. Sometimes it is like the insufferable loudmouth who cuts you off and tries to finish your sentences for you, though ChatGPT is much more subtle about doing that.

ChatGPT is powered by a Deep Neural Network (DNN) which is a fancy way of describing software architectures that are intended to mimic the thought processes of the human brain. Rather than producing simple binary answers, DNN tries to learn by processing many possible answers and spotting common patterns across those examples.

Programs like ChatGPT are especially good at absorbing and learning from large volumes of data, including text, audio, images, and most anything else fed to it. From this large corpus of data it catalogs the similarities gathered from different sources, and tries to associate them in a logical manner. This process involves training the software to learn grammar, semantics and conceptual relationships from all the data to which it has access. This training is not without controversy as it most certainly reflects the beliefs, prejudices, and opinions of the programmers.

Without a doubt the most attractive feature of ChatGPT is its ability to chat and provide at least a semblance of carrying on a conversation. Ask a question of a search engine such as Google and you will get hundreds of "hits" that may or may not relate to your question. ChatGPT will provide a single answer, and if it is not the answer you are seeking you can engage in a back-and-forth chat to clarify your query so that ChatGPT can better understand what you are looking for.

Finally, for this week, it is important to understand that ChatGPT is not monolithic. That is a topic worthy of its own column, so be sure to come back next week.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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