How Does ChatGPT Work? (Simple & Technical Explanations)

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) tool. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to generate responses to user text inputs.

It means you can get access to a super-smart chatbot trained on a huge set of data. You can ask ChatGPT to:

• Answer questions
• Generate creative works
• Engage in sophisticated conversations
• Much more

The AI research company OpenAI created ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s name refers to the chat-based nature of the tool and its use of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology.

GPT-3 (the third generation) literally made headlines when it wrote a full article for The Guardian.

OpenAI released the latest version (GPT-4) in March 2023. It’s available through ChatGPT Plus. Bing also uses the technology to run its search engine.

However, we’ll focus on GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 (that produces more interactive and engaging responses) that the free ChatGPT uses.

Further reading:

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT works by attempting to understand a text input (called a prompt) and generating dynamic text to respond.

It can do this because it’s a large language model (LLM). It’s essentially a super-sized computer program that can understand and produce natural language.

Here’s how ChatGPT describes it:

ChatGPT’s creators used a deep learning training process to make this possible. In other words, they gave this computer the tools to process data like a human brain does.

Eventually, the system could...