What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?

A most distinguished member of the academy, Steven Wolfram has provided a substantial contribution to the body of thought on AI.As the world is agog with the mystery, potential, risk, and opportunity associated with large language models, Dr. Wolfram provides a clear concise explanation of how LLMs came into being, how they work, the class of problems that they address, the large class of problems that they will not address, and the extent to which they are inexplicable.AI changes everything and Generative AI significantly accelerates that change. Fueled by the advent of LLM’s, AI has moved to the top of the agenda of though leaders in the academy, industry, and government.We are seeing innovative, previously unimaginable breakthrough applications of LLMs introduced daily. The scope of the application of these models to change the way we work, communicate, administer, and entertain is staggeringly large and unknowably vast.As you attempt to parse the cacophony of messaging from the large and growing chorus of technology providers, politicians, media, opportunists, charlatans, fear mongers, and pundits regarding LLMs, Dr. Wolfram ‘s book will provide you a solid grounding of what this stuff really is, what it can do, and – importantly -- what it cannot do.

First of all, as a true techie, I love Wolfram's work, not the physics, but his elegant, refreshing and bold contribution to mathematics and creating tools to bring that complexity to everybody. His first go at it, Mathematica put so many modes of computation on one's desktop as a standalone. This includes ultra high precision (seemingly un-limited digits), way powerful symbolic calculations including complex algebra expression factoring, equation solving, graphing, and full differential and integral calculus, and to top it off, rule-based logic and far more.You have to wait until the later chapters for it, but after explaining the brain-dead simplicity of neural network "learning", he figuratively destroys ChatGPT, dismembering it, and thrusting its flaws at the reader's face for all to see. I found it shocking, but most fascinating, as he describes why fixing ChatGPT's Achilles heel will be near impossible and certainly not worth the effort.ChatGPT which works on such a brute force simple single principle, neural net weightings, can never be a match for real intelligence crafted into a product. I love geniuses who later in life wax philosophical (If you do, check out Irwin Schrodinger's "What is Life" and his [20 years later] "My View of the World". Steven Wolfram is definitely a computational genius, with a divine gift of designing, creating, and polishing the highest mathematical tools, and then giving them to the world. As such he is entitled to wax philosophical, too.As a religious Jew, and I think anyone religious would agree, no amount of appending the most fitting next nucleotide into a string of DNA will produce something as complex as a housefly, all the more so a human - sorry Darwin. All the top NASA engineers and scientists can not come close to the fly's taking and landing ability on any angled surface, its ability to evade capture by a human being by quickly seeing and evaluating trajectories 100's of times per second, its ability see in a myriad of directions simultaneously, its getting its energy from simple waste materials, and its manufacturing ability to replicate thousands of itself from those same materials in record time.Steven Wolfram has thus done humanity a great service. Fear no longer. This wave of AI is brain dead and will not take over the world, not with its lack of the most elementary mathematical, or even arithmetical ability.As I thank Steven Wolfram for his perfectionist products, and enjoy reading his books large and small, I hope he will understand that to my mind, he has made it clear that, in the most similar way, his taking down of ChatGPT by exposing its limitations of its simple technique of choosing the best 'atom' to append, he has, in one glorious stroke, also eviscerated Darwin and exposed the extreme stupidity of believing that random mutations plus survival of the fittest (picking the most fitting next DNA 'letter') can ever compete with an alternative such as truly thoughtful and intelligent crafting and designing.Wolfram refreshingly blurts out the truth. I agree and will close, sharing that expecting Darwin's theory to produce life is now as foolish as expecting ChatGPT to calculate numbers, to take one example, to calculate Pi to even a few dozen places, a task Wolfram's tools now can all do in a split second.To also put it bluntly, after reading "What Is ChatGPT doing ... and Why Does It Work?" , knee jerk use of science or technology to defend atheism, is no longer an effective option.

A person is rated as having high general intelligence based on superior memory, superior skills with written language, and superior use of computational thinking. Now the first two are being executed somewhat unreliably by an upgraded pattern completion device, the transformer. This device depends on the artificial neural network, invented only slightly more recently than the stored program digital computer, itself.Stephen Wolfram, who is well known for adapting language to computational thinking, wrote a good introduction aimed at someone who knows at least a little about the technology. Nevertheless, the slog is hard through engineering embellishments like embedding, attention, positional marking, and connection dropping. The software is a true black box, in any case. It happens to work. But there is little to gain by contemplating the billions of processing elements and hundreds of billions of connections. You might as well try to understand the mystery of intelligent life by contemplating the electrochemical complexity of grey matter.Stephen Wolfram wishes to tame the gpt technology by interfacing it to his precisely defined tools for computation. He shows clearly that ChatCPT is unreliable when faced with something even slightly computational. The hope is that the transformer will benefit from the disciplines of Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica. I look forward to following the progress here. But as a retiree , I think I'll stay directly with the human generated, edited, and referenced articles of Wikipedia.

Look, Wolfram is clearly a very smart guy. Mathematica is an awesome accomplishment. But Wolfram needs to stop hinting to everybody about how smart he is.He gives a rather basic example of how neural networks work but leaves out very important details in his examples (for example, why this number of hidden layers vs. that number of hidden layers). He then goes on to show how ChatGPT gets things wrong by basically showing that Wolfram/Alpha gets them right.Nothing he says is wrong but, to paraphrase the comedians catch line, “it’s the way he says it”

I really enjoyed reading this book. I know there is a free blog post with the same content, but books are easier for me to digest than blogs when it comes to long texts. I definitely understand the technology better now.Some cons:* Kindle version is not great. It's ok to read it on smartphone but not on Kindle. Some images are difficult to see.* Transformers could be explained better* Author tries to plug his product, Wolfram|Alpha, a little bit too much.