Drew KadelMy daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
Nate Gaylinn@DrewKadel Love this. We want so badly for ChatGPT to produce answers, opinions, and art, but all it can do is make plausible simulations of those things. As a species, we've never had to deal with that before.
Fabian Transchel@ngaylinn @DrewKadel Well we had - conceptually this is *exactly* the same as with Eliza - just two orders of magnitude more sophisticated and two orders of magnitude more connected.
At its core it's really just people lacking technical understanding hallucinating an antropomorphization of a conditional probability distribution.
With ChatGPT, the interface is the innovation, *not* the model.
@ftranschel @DrewKadel Oh? What makes the ChatGPT interface so innovative? :)
@ngaylinn @DrewKadel Using LLMs interactively is surely an innovative way of using them.
Case in point: When reduced to token completion (which ChatGPT hides away), the magic goes away... quite fast (:
@ftranschel @DrewKadel That's certainly true. They do a lot of "theater" to make it seem like you're talking to someone.
Donald Hobern@ngaylinn @ftranschel @DrewKadel
Theatre is an excellent description. There's clearly NLP in front of the prediction engine itself, and some application of post-predictive review steps. But it's all presented as though this composite application is the LLM. It's like attending a seance.
@dhobern @ngaylinn @DrewKadel I agree with your perspective. For me it's more like a computer version of the Oracle of Delphi, but that's essentially just a different representation of the same idea.