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

This is an easy and engaging read: no easy task. The intelligence of the author and his deep grasp of the subject are obvious, and I recommend to both technical and non-technical readers.

An informative book. It was a very good refresher into neural networks, which I studied over 20 years ago. It is amazing how far things have moved in technology.The problem I had I this book though I did grasp the concepts the pictures of the symbolism had me more confused. I do like that the book, in a way, promotes the human to AI to human concept, but towards the end, it starts pushing Wolfram|Alpha as a way to boost Chat GPT in light of the the mistakes that Chat GPT makes.I did get a better understanding of Chat GPT and neural networks after reading this book. I will say this is not a not a book for beginners. A decent understanding of IT is necessary. Though it is a year since this book has been published so some bugs/mistakes might already have been fixed.

The figures are poorly formatted and unreadable in the kindle version.

Very clear description provided in an intuitive way.

A clear explanation of how ChatGPT works, what it is good for and where its limitations are.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past six months, the chances are you have heard of ChatGPT.ChatGPT has not just changed the world we live in by bringing artificial intelligence into the hands of the general population. It has defined a new era in which we live.In April 2023, it was reported that 10 million queries were requested each day. That might not seem like a lot, but it only took OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) 5 days to reach 1 billion users. To put that into context, tech giant Instagram (who took the second least amount of time to reach this figure) took two months!ChatGPT is not just the most common form of AI that is used - but also provides the backbone for other AI services out there through the use of its API.But how does it work?How can it interact with you and provide such in-depth information with such a high degree of accuracy?Spoiler alert - whilst we may know the answer to some of these questions (this book tries to answer), we don’t fully understand, and perhaps we never will.This is a highly recommended book, which, although at times does become a bit technical, is positioned in a way that would allow anyone interested in technology to get something.

The book explains the engineering of chat gpt well for a beginner in AI to understand. When it comes to why any of this leads to a program that creates plausible english, and why the design and engineering of chat gpt work so well when other designs have not worked, the answer is every single time “I have literally no idea why”. He then throws in a casual sentence each time saying “it’s probably possible to understand it so hopefully in the future we will” and doesn’t expand on it. If you want to understand chat gpt this book will not help.

Rubbish, light on detail and very poor in explaining how it works.

When I mentioned to my Machine Learning friend that I'm reading Wofram's book to understand ChatGPT, he kinda laughed because Wolfram is not a machine learning scientist. However, for such a short book the ROI of reading it seemed high. For me, this provided a nice bridge because I have a background in Math and Data Analytics, but don't have much hands-on experience with neural networks. This short and inexpensive book provided a good overview of LLM limitations and gave me something to think about in the future.

This is one of the most poorly written books I've ever read; for someone who works on language tools, Wolfram seems to have little to show for it. When you see that one paragraph in three begins with "OK, so", you already know that you'll have to brace yourself.The writing style is quite bad and confusing, with a lot of parentheses and a copious use of quotes for common words or obvious analogies. There is no clear structure, and the topic suddenly changes from one paragraph to the next without any proper transition. Conjunctions seem to be randomly used, and I won't even talk about the punctuation. It's almost like reading the transcript of a young student struggling to explain something newly learned to another.For a topic that isn't trivial, adding so much confusion is a fatal mistake. Fortunately, I know enough about neural networks, and I have some basic insight into LLMs, or I wouldn't have been able to read past the first chapter.The content is rather disappointing. When I ordered this book, I was hoping to get a better insight into the LLM-based engines and why they worked so well, perhaps also what they do well, how they could evolve, or how they shouldn't be used. Unfortunately, the author doesn't really answer the question in the title and doesn't attempt to address the other related topics. Most of the time, the answer is "we don't know why it works or why we do it like that", which might be partly true but makes me wonder if that's the right person to write such a book (or if it was worth writing in the first place).The author doesn't miss an opportunity to talk about Wolfram tools, though. Is that advertising in disguise, seizing the opportunity created by the current AI hype? Why, instead of presenting some obscure tool screenshot, hasn't he used simple diagrams or more commonly used tools? The charts, where the colours needed to interpret them have been greyed out, are also quite a letdown.I've seen relatively short videos that did a much better job of explaining GPT's inner workings and discussing their limitations or possible evolution. For example, search for videos made by Judie Burchell or Jeremy Howard. There's simply no upside to this book that I can think of.Don't bother.

Assez technique mais passionnant pour les aficionados !Avec en prime des réflexions sur ce que tout ça nous enseigne du fctnnmt du cerveau.

This book is written by a person who has been working on AI and has been somewhat surprised by the success of Chatgpt. It is certainly worth reading, but a certain level of expertise on computation theory is necessary to understand it fully. Interesting to see the limitations of Chatgpt and LLM models. I think it is very good, but the title is a little misleading (that is why I do not give 5 *)

Gained a better understanding of LLM’s potential and limitations.