What’s Behind ChatGPT!

Muslum Yildiz
Academy Team
Published in
13 min readAug 18, 2023

ChatGPT has drew significant attention by reaching one million users in just its first five days, becoming the most talked-about topic in the world of technology. The rapid ascent of ChatGPT reflects its impressive potential in both understanding and generating human language. This article aims to comprehensively explain the intricate inner workings of ChatGPT. By delving into Natural Language Processing (NLP), the nuances of machine learning techniques, and the power of Transformers, it aims to provide insights that will help you harness ChatGPT’s potential more effectively. Additionally, it will acquaint you with the latest technological advancements in this field.

A Glimpse into ChatGPT

ChatGPT, combining machine communication with interaction with artificial intelligence, is an AI-powered chatbot that operates through a potent fusion of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. What sets it apart from others is its exceptional ability to comprehend context and provide responses tailored to users’ requests.

Imagine traditional chatbots struggling to grasp the nuances of conversation. ChatGPT, on the other hand, stands out with its remarkable ability to understand context. It excels at dissecting relevant context, discerning underlying meanings, and providing responses that align with the user’s intent.

The true power of ChatGPT emerges from the vast dataset that fuels its intelligence. Based on GPT-3.5, ChatGPT’s training data amounts to around 45 terabytes. Consider that one terabyte is equivalent to about 83 million pages of information. This immense dataset endows ChatGPT with an unparalleled ability to comprehend patterns, nuances, and relationships between words and expressions. This grants it the capacity to generate coherent and meaningful responses across a wide range of questions.

ChatGPT’s operational principle relies on two fundamental stages: input understanding and response generation. In the first stage, text inputs written by users are directed to the initial part of ChatGPT’s neural network. This section strives to comprehend the meaning and context of the input. Subsequently, in the second stage, a response is generated. During this phase, a response is formulated using the information derived from understanding the input.

Note: If you want to grasp the intricacies of the complexity of the human brain and its connection with artificial intelligence, you can access the details from the link below.

The complexity of the human brain and its relationship with artificial intelligence

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Its Significance:

Natural Language Processing (NLP) resides at the intersection of linguistics and computer science. This technology enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. The everyday impacts of NLP are felt across various domains, from automated correction features to plagiarism detection systems. For ChatGPT, NLP forms a fundamental building block. The model must comprehend the user’s input and generate responses akin to human-like ones. However, there lies a challenge: computers cannot inherently understand natural language like humans can. So, how do computers manage to grasp and process textual information?

Computers employ complex algorithms and data structures to comprehend and process textual data. In order to understand the meaning encapsulated within texts, a numerical or vector-based representation is constructed to capture the essence of the texts. These structures enhance a computer’s capacity to comprehend texts and extract the underlying meaning beneath them. Consequently, computers become capable of delving deep into the understanding of texts like humans, enabling them to generate text that is human-like in nature.

These structures can be formed using word vectors or embedding-based methods. Each word is represented by a vector, and the meaning of the word is captured through calculations of distance or similarity between these vectors. This way, computers can comprehend the semantic relationships between different words and decipher the context within the text.

Moreover, deep learning models are employed to understand the structures and relationships present in texts. These models can detect patterns and relationships within the text, thereby gaining a better understanding of the text’s meaning. Particularly, Transformer-based models process the content of the text layer by layer, allowing for a more profound comprehension of the meaning.

The creation of such structures by computers to comprehend text also brings about the ability to generate text similar to humans. Understanding the content of the text involves grasping the language structure, meaning, and tone embedded within the text. Hence, thanks to these structures, computers can capture the underlying meaning of texts and produce human-like, fluent text. This marks a significant advancement in text-based applications and the field of AI-assisted text generation.

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT):

At the heart of ChatGPT’s intellectual prowess lies the fundamental architecture known as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). The term “Transformer” refers to the neural network structure’s ability to transform inputs into contextually meaningful outputs. This foundational structure, pioneered by OpenAI, forms the basis for ChatGPT’s capabilities.

ChatGPT leverages the Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) architecture to tremendously enhance its language processing abilities. This transformative architecture is considered a revolutionary step in the field of artificial intelligence and underpins the success of ChatGPT.

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) are known for their ability to learn from a vast dataset beforehand. This dataset encompasses texts, documents, web pages, and more. Utilizing this dataset, ChatGPT starts to comprehend the structures, patterns, and meanings inherent in language. Thanks to its pre-trained foundation, ChatGPT not only hones its ability to understand and generate text but also acquires a fundamental understanding of language.

The GPT architecture is designed to achieve remarkable results in natural language processing tasks. This architecture is highly effective in understanding the context and relationships in texts. It employs an attention mechanism to comprehend how words and sentences interact with each other in the text. As a result, it can grasp the meaning in texts more deeply and use this understanding to generate human-like text.

The usage of ChatGPT demonstrates the power of this GPT architecture. ChatGPT analyzes texts, understands them, and generates appropriate responses instantly by leveraging the learned information. This represents a significant leap in conversational applications, text generation, and even language comprehension research.

The Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) architecture is the fundamental technology used to enhance ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities. GPT enables ChatGPT to perform impressively in natural language due to its ability to understand the complexity and richness of language.

Model Training:

The training of ChatGPT involves various machine learning techniques: ChatGPT functions using complex neural network patterns to understand context and produce responses. The learning process encompasses unsupervised and supervised learning stages involving understanding context and generating responses. Human supervision aids in teaching AI ethics and morality, and the development process is faster than human cognitive development.

1. Data Collection and Preprocessing:

The unsupervised learning process begins with data collection and preprocessing stages. In the data collection phase, a vast pool of textual data is gathered from various sources on the internet. These sources include blog posts, news articles, journals, web pages, forums, and more. The collected textual data should encompass a wide diversity and scope to enable the model to work effectively across different topics and language structures.

The collected data goes through the preprocessing stage:

Tokenization: The text is divided into the smallest meaningful units called tokens. These are often words or subtext fragments. For example, the sentence “Hello, how are you?” is tokenized into “Hello”, “,”, “how”, “are”, and “you”.

Cleaning: Unnecessary special characters, links, HTML tags, and other noise elements in the text are removed.

Lowercase Conversion: The text is usually converted to lowercase to disregard the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters.

Stopwords Removal: Common words like “and”, “but”, “or” that generally don’t carry significant meaning are removed, as they often don’t contribute to the sentence’s meaning.

Lemmatization: Words are transformed into their base forms. For instance, different inflections like “running”, “ran”, “run” are lemmatized to the base form “run”.

2. Unsupervised Learning and Transformer Architecture:

The working principle of ChatGPT bears similarities to how human infants learn language. Infants learn language by listening to the speech of those around them and internalizing various conversations. Similarly, ChatGPT learns language by analyzing the text data it collects from the internet. Like infants, ChatGPT’s neural networks also spontaneously form connections, recognize patterns, and generate responses. This process is referred to as unsupervised learning.

ChatGPT’s learning process primarily begins with the unsupervised learning phase. In this phase, artificial intelligence processes a large amount of text data without any human supervision or guidance. Data is collected from various text sources on the internet, including blog posts, articles, news, web pages, and more. These texts encompass a variety of topics, contexts, and language patterns.

ChatGPT processes this data to understand similarities, connections, and patterns among texts. Specifically, it attempts to discover word frequencies, sentence structures, and relationships between terms, aiming to group texts and comprehend topics. This stage allows ChatGPT to gain awareness of different topics and contexts by analyzing texts. Following the unsupervised learning phase, ChatGPT’s neural networks become capable of understanding patterns and connections in texts. During this phase, it extracts features such as topic categorization, recognition of key terms, and identification of language patterns. ChatGPT’s ability to understand context develops at this stage, enhancing its capability to comprehend various texts.

In this phase, the neural network concerned with understanding context encounters a substantial amount of text data from the internet. Without human guidance, artificial intelligence identifies patterns, relationships, and topics from this data. It amalgamates similar pieces of information and establishes connections between concepts. Text data is processed using a large-scale Transformer model. Transformer is a groundbreaking architecture in language modeling, capable of capturing long-range dependencies within text.

As ChatGPT engages with the vast amount of text data, it learns about the intricacies of language and the relationships between words, phrases, and concepts. This stage of unsupervised learning enables ChatGPT to develop a solid foundation for understanding and generating coherent and contextually relevant responses.

The Transformer architecture is regarded as a groundbreaking innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. This innovation has brought significant advancements in natural language processing and text comprehension. Previous models struggled to address long-range dependencies within texts, while the Transformer architecture effectively solved this issue. The attention mechanism is employed to understand the relationships between each word and other words in the text. This enables the capture of relationships in complex sentence structures, leading to more accurate comprehension. Additionally, its parallel processing capability allows rapid handling of large text datasets. With these features, Transformer has achieved remarkable success in various language models and text-based tasks. Both in supervised learning stages and reinforcement learning processes, the Transformer architecture has made it possible to generate more intelligent, meaningful, and contextually rich responses. In this regard, Transformers have laid the foundation for a remarkable breakthrough in natural language processing and the field of artificial intelligence.

Encoder and Decoder Blocks: The Transformer architecture consists of multiple repeating Encoder and Decoder blocks. Encoders extract features from the text, while Decoders are used for predicting consecutive tokens.

Attention Mechanism: The Transformer employs an attention mechanism to understand the relationships of each token with other tokens. This is crucial for capturing context within the text.

3. Supervised Learning and Human Supervision:

After the unsupervised learning phase, ChatGPT transitions to the supervised learning stage. In this stage, human supervision and guidance come into play. ChatGPT is directed by humans to learn how to generate accurate responses related to user inputs and requests. During the supervised learning phase, human annotators or trainers evaluate the responses generated by ChatGPT. They distinguish between correct, incorrect, appropriate, and inappropriate responses. This feedback helps improve ChatGPT’s ability to generate responses. Through human supervision, ChatGPT learns ethical and moral boundaries and can correct erroneous responses.

The model obtained from unsupervised learning proceeds to the supervised learning phase to learn generating sensible responses to given queries. The model is trained using input and output examples provided by humans. Humans guide the model to produce realistic and meaningful responses.

The training data usually comprises real human responses and inputs. The model learns to produce fitting responses to inputs by adjusting token-level weights based on these training data. The training of ChatGPT occurs in two stages. In the first stage, text data collected from the internet is loaded into the input understanding network. This stage can take up to about a year and utilizes millions of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In the second stage, the response generation network learns through human-supervised training. Humans evaluate and correct the generated responses. In this manner, ethical and moral standards are imparted to ChatGPT.

In conclusion, ChatGPT’s learning process commences with the unsupervised learning stage, where it learns contextual nuances and language patterns by analyzing text. In the supervised learning stage, response generation is refined through human supervision. Working together, these two stages enable ChatGPT to provide users with more meaningful, relevant, and high-quality responses.

4. Reinforcement Learning:

ChatGPT is exposed to various input data without a specific output. It builds patterns, context, and relationships based on its pre-training foundation. This equips ChatGPT with the ability to respond meaningfully, contextually, and relevantly to diverse inputs. Following supervised learning, the reinforcement learning phase is introduced. In this phase, human evaluators’ scoring feedback is used to produce better responses.

A “controller” model generates responses, and human evaluators score the generated responses. Higher-quality responses receive higher scores. The model is optimized based on scoring feedback to enhance the quality of responses. To optimize responses, it learns based on a reward model. The model learns to improve its responses using positive and negative feedback. This can be likened to a dog learning commands — correct behaviors are rewarded, while mistakes are penalized, leading the dog to learn correct behaviors over time. Similarly, ChatGPT learns by enhancing its responses over time.

In the next stage, developers guide ChatGPT to assign rewards or rankings to potential outputs. By distinguishing the best answers from various possible responses, ChatGPT learns to identify high-quality outcomes and thus enhances its ability to provide contextually relevant responses.

5. Iterative Progress and Re-training:

Throughout the supervised learning phase, ChatGPT refines its response generation based on human-evaluated and scored answers. This process is iterated, and the AI learns to produce better and more suitable responses. Human oversight and feedback aid ChatGPT in improving its answers and generating higher-quality responses.

Supervised and reinforcement learning stages are repeated. The model is continually fed with more training data and human scoring feedback. The model hones its performance by working on incorrect or weak responses. Training data is continuously updated, and efforts are made to enhance the model’s response generation capabilities. This cycle of iteration and re-training allows ChatGPT to progressively improve its abilities in generating coherent and contextually relevant responses.

6. Service Deployment and User Interaction:

Once the training process is complete, ChatGPT is deployed as a service. Users interact with ChatGPT by providing text inputs in the form of questions or conversations. Leveraging its learned language model, ChatGPT generates meaningful and intelligent responses.

7. Continuous Improvement and Updates:

User feedback and usage data are consistently collected. These data are utilized to evaluate and enhance ChatGPT’s performance. Models are updated with new data and feedback to produce more accurate and useful responses over time. This iterative process ensures that ChatGPT continuously evolves and provides improved assistance to users.

In this article, we have thoroughly examined the working logic of ChatGPT and witnessed how this technology has brought about a revolutionary change in the field of natural language processing. Built upon the foundation of GPT-3.5/4, ChatGPT showcases unique capabilities in tasks ranging from text comprehension to response generation and even creative text creation. Thanks to its advanced language modeling and the Transformer architecture, ChatGPT’s capacity to generate realistic and intelligent responses is truly impressive.

The future potential of this technology is tremendously exciting. ChatGPT’s learning process can be continually enhanced with more data and feedback. As its ability to interact with humans in more interactive and emotionally rich text generation is developed, it opens the door to personalized experiences with a learning artificial intelligence model. Envisioning a future where ChatGPT can provide creative solutions in fields like healthcare, education, music, literature, and many more is truly inspiring.

In conclusion, the operational logic of ChatGPT not only interacts with text but also expands our imagination. By combining the power of language and the potential of artificial intelligence, technologies like ChatGPT will become crucial tools shaping the future of communication and information processing. In this exciting journey towards the future, we must take steps forward both in technology and in upholding human values.

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