I read an article titled ChatGPT’s Most Charming Trick Is Also Its Biggest Flaw at https://www.wired.com/story/openai-chatgpts-most-charming-trick-hides-its-biggest-flaw/. The article touches on the very statistical predictive nature of ChatGPT. The article delves into the impressive and not-so-impressive aspects of ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model that has been making waves in the tech world. ChatGPT can generate text that is strikingly similar to human speech and can hold conversations on a wide variety of topics. It has been lauded for its ability to generate creative and imaginative responses, leading some to suggest that it could even pass the Turing test, which requires an AI to display intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. However, the article highlights a significant flaw in ChatGPT's design, namely its tendency to repeat certain phrases and ideas. This repetition often leads to incoherent and nonsensical responses, indicating that the model still has a long way to go in terms of mimicking human conversation effectively.
I think this is super interesting because it highlights the fact that at its core, ChatGPT is still a model that predicts the next most likely word. By generating text one word at a time, it is missing out on fundamental reasoning abilities that humans have when we think about bigger ideas. The thing that makes language models successful as predictive models is the same thing that will make them not replace humans entirely.
