Hackerman_uwuIs this real though? Does ChatGPT just literally take whole snippets of texts like that? I thought it used some aggregate or probability based on the whole corpus of tectonic was trained on.
It does, but the thing with the probability is that it doesn’t always pick the most likely next bit of text, it basically rolls dice and picks maybe the second or third or in rare cases hundredth most likely continuation. This chaotic behaviour is part of what makes it feel “intelligent” and why it’s possible to reroll responses to the same prompt.
I remember doing ghetto text generation in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) class, and the logic was basically this:
This is a rough explanation of Baysian nets, which I think are what’s used in LLMs. We used a very simple n-gram model (e.g. n words are considered for the statistics, e.g. “to my math” is much more likely to generate “class” than “homework”), but they’re probably doing fancy things with text categorization and whatnot to generate more relevant text.
The LLM isn’t really “thinking” here, it’s just associating input text and the training data to generate output text.
Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:
thedailywtf.com/…/the-automated-curse-generator
Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.
The Automated Curse Generator
It was 1999, and Brian's company's new online marketing venture was finally off the ground and making a profit using an off-the-shelf conglomeration of bits and pieces of various content management, affiliate program, and ad servers. Brian's team had hit all of the goals for the first funding tranche, and the next step was to use those millions of dollars to grow the staff from twelve to fifty, half of whom would be software developers working directly for Brian. The project was an $8 million, nine-month development effort to build, from the ground up, the best 21st-century marketing/e-commerce/community/ad network/reporting system mousetrap possible. Leading a team of twenty people was a big step up for Brian, so he buckled down, read management theory books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, learned the ins-and-outs of project management software, invested in UML and process training, and carefully pored over resumes to find the best candidates.
Yup, and I’m guessing LLMs use Markov chains, which are also a really old concept (the idea is >100 years old, and it’s used in compression algorithms like LZMA).