AI Chatbots Are Getting Better. But an Interview With ChatGPT Reveals Their Limits
Brandon McGee
“The program, called ChatGPT, is more advanced than any other chatbot available for public interaction, and many observers say it represents a step change in the industry.
ChatGPT’s fluency is an illusion that stems from the combination of massive amounts of data, immense computing power, and novel processing techniques—but it’s a powerful one.
Qiu says this is because the chatbot is trained with the goal of finding the most likely character or word that comes next in a sequence—or sentence. ‘It’s a statistical model.’ That isn’t how humans think, Qiu says. ‘People will say, ‘GPT understands this.’ But it really begs the question: what is understanding? Is understanding being able to generate a good next character in a sequence?’”
