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Inaugural GVSU Quest Series Panel Tackles ChatGPT
March 07, 2023
The Office of the Provost recently launched the GVSU Quest Series, an Academic Affairs forum created to reflect on timely issues. The topic for the opening event was ChatGPT. Computing Professor Dr. Jared Moore was on the inaugural panel and the Provost invited him to open the discussion with the question, “What is ChatGPT?”
Although it’s commonly described as a large-language model, at its heart, he explained, it’s a deep-learning model. Deep neural networks are somewhat like a brain with neurons connected by weighted links that modify information flowing between neurons. The combination of neurons processing their inputs and the structure of the connections between neurons enable the information processing we're now witnessing. Examples of their use include self-driving cars, Dall-E with image generation, and GPT2/GPT3, the new standard in models that autogenerate text.
“The real advances with ChatGPT are its ability to infer context. How does it work? You feed it a prompt and the model goes token by token, or word by word, through your prompt and generates another word. You feed it a prompt and it looks at each word in turn, the internals of it allows it to process that and then it basically predicts the next word. It uses that word and your word prompt to predict the next word, which predicts the next word, and we end up with a sequence. It can process up to about 2048 words in a row, so we can give it a fairly long prompt and get some seemingly meaningful responses. The self-attention is the key part. It allows it to infer context. If we give it a sentence like, ‘A robot must obey orders given to it,’ the word it is ambiguous. We know “it” refers to the robot, and probably the biggest advance in ChatGPT compared to other models is the network itself can now guess and infer what those ambiguous parts of language mean and that has helped with the sequence generation aspect of things.”
The panel went on to discuss some of the broader issues, concerns, and opportunities ChatGPT presents. The consensus was it’s not magic, it’s a statistical model and ultimately a tool that all of us are going to have to learn to use effectively.
Click HERE to watch the entire discussion and to find other resources, go HERE