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?

  • @[email protected]
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    1210 months ago

    Try to use it to solve a difficult problem and it will become extremely obvious that it has no idea what it is talking about.

    • @[email protected]
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      210 months ago

      Yup. I used it to try to figure out why our Java code was getting permission denied on jar files despite being owned by the user running the code and 777 permissions while upgrading from rhel7 to 8

      It gave me some good places to check, but the answer was that rhel8 uses fapolicyd instead of selinux (which I found myself on some tangentially related stack exchange post)