An Introduction to ChatGPT for Beginners

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This week, we'll take a look at ChatGPT and try to wrap our heads around how it works. Let's get into it!

We're now solidly living in the age of artificial intelligence. An age where advanced technologies compute faster and function at higher levels than anyone would have thought possible just a short few years ago.

Since AI is here to stay, we need to learn how to work with it. Not embracing and using AI (cautiously and with our eyes wide open to its perils) can leave us light-years behind, hinder us from reaching business and professional goals, and even take away our edge over the competition. But before we can start using artificial intelligence all willy-nilly, we need a basic understanding of what it is and how it works so we can get the most out of using it.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT, a type of AI that uses something called natural language processing to understand and work with human language and define terms that are essential to understanding how it and similar applications operate.

If you’re not into computers or don’t have much technical know-how, the way ChatGPT functions may not be the easiest to understand. To break through this knowledge barrier, I went straight to the source—ChatGPT, and asked it to tell me what it is, how it works, and why it’s important in the simplest terms possible.

Here’s what ChatGPT told me:

"ChatGPT is a computer program that can understand and create human-like text. It's a type of artificial intelligence (AI), which means it's designed to do things the human brain can do, like understand what people say and writing sentences that make sense.

Now, you might be wondering what makes ChatGPT so special. Well, ChatGPT is an example of a language model, which is a special kind of AI that focuses on understanding and creating human language. It's kind of like a super-smart computer program that can guess what words should come next in a sentence to make the sentence sound like something a person would say.

One way to think about ChatGPT is like a very advanced version of the autocomplete feature on your phone. You know how when you're typing a message, your phone suggests words that you might want to use next? ChatGPT does something similar, but it's way more powerful and can create entire sentences and paragraphs that sound like they were written by a person.

But how does ChatGPT learn to understand and create human language? It's all thanks to something called natural language processing (NLP). NLP is a way for computers to understand and work with human language, like reading text and figuring out what it means or writing text that makes sense. ChatGPT uses NLP techniques to do things like answer questions, write stories, or even help you with your homework!

So, how does ChatGPT learn all these language tricks? It's trained using a method called deep learning, which is a special kind of machine learning. Machine learning is when computers learn from data without being specifically told what to do. In deep learning, the computer uses something called a neural network to find patterns in the data. Neural networks are designed to work kind of like the networks of brain cells in our own brains. They can be really good at finding patterns and learning from them.

ChatGPT is trained using a huge amount of text data from the internet. It learns by studying the patterns in this text and then trying to predict what words should come next in a sentence. Over time, it gets better and better at understanding and creating human language.

It's important to remember that ChatGPT is just a tool, and it's not perfect. Sometimes it might create text that doesn't make a lot of sense or is incorrect. But it's still a really powerful and useful tool that can help people in many different ways.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is an advanced language model that uses AI and NLP techniques to understand and generate human-like text. It learns from lots of data and uses deep learning and neural networks to find patterns in the text. This powerful tool can be used for many different tasks, like answering questions, writing stories, or helping with homework. As AI continues to improve, tools like ChatGPT will become even more amazing and useful in our everyday lives."

Artificial Intelligence Terms You Should Know

ChatGPT breaks down quite a few terms in its response, but I needed more, so I conducted a little research, ran the terms through ChatGPT separately, and created even easier-to-understand definitions of the most important of them.

Learning what the terms below mean will help you understand how learning language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT process the information we feed it and how it creates output.

Algorithm: A set of instructions that tells a computer what to do.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): A field of study and a collection of techniques and algorithms that enable computer systems to be capable of performing tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): A subfield of AI that focuses on the interaction between computers and human language, allowing computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.

Model: In the context of ChatGPT, "model" refers to a computational algorithm that is designed to learn patterns and relationships in data through a process known as training.

Language Model: A system that guesses word combinations to create text similar to human writing. Language models are artificial intelligence models specifically designed for processing, understanding, and generating human language. ChatGPT is a natural language processor that uses natural language processing techniques to perform a wide range of tasks.

Machine Learning (ML): Machine learning is a way for computers to learn and make decisions by analyzing data without being specifically instructed on how to do it. Instead of writing detailed instructions (programs) for every possible situation, machine learning allows computers to identify patterns and relationships in the data and then make decisions based on what they learn.

Deep Learning: A part of machine learning that uses computer systems called neural networks, modeled after the neural networks found in the human brain, to find patterns in data, often for tasks like recognizing images and understanding language.

Neural Network: A computer system structured and designed to work like the neurons in neural networks found in the human brain that is used in deep learning to process large amounts of data.

Training Data: A set of examples used to teach an AI model how to perform a specific task, such as recognizing images or understanding text.

Prompt: A prompt is an input we enter into an AI model to get a specific kind of output.

Input: Information or data we enter into an app or program.

Output: The result an app or computer program produces after receiving input.

ChatGPT: A type of artificial neural network algorithm that uses deep learning techniques to process natural language. The algorithm behind ChatGPT is responsible for taking in a prompt or input from a user, processing it, and generating a response that is contextually relevant and grammatically correct. The algorithm has been trained on large amounts of text data and is capable of generating human-like responses to a wide range of prompts.

Learning the basics of how AI platforms like ChatGPT work lays the foundation for gaining advanced technological skills. Commit to learning something new about using ChatGPT and artificial intelligence so you can stay ahead of the game.