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Quote by George MacDonald

“They say that Time and Space exist not, save in our thoughts. If so, then that which has been is, and the Past can never cease.”

Quote by George MacDonald

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George MacDonald
George MacDonald

George MacDonald was a 19th-century Scottish author known for his fantasy literature and religious thought. His works had a profound influence on later writers, such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. more

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“Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun “vehicle.” They use that word to refer to cars, buses, bikes, spacecraft, and all other ways of getting from place A to place B. Conversations in this world are confusing. There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks. There is a breakthrough in rocketry, but the media focuses on how vehicles have gotten faster—so people call their car dealer (oops, vehicle dealer) to ask when faster models will be available. Meanwhile, fraudsters have capitalized on the fact that consumers don’t know what to believe when it comes to vehicle technology, so scams are rampant in the vehicle sector. Now replace the word “vehicle” with “artificial intelligence,” and we have a pretty good description of the world we live in. Artificial intelligence, AI for short, is an umbrella term for a set of loosely related technologies. ChatGPT has little in common with, say, software that banks use to evaluate loan applicants. Both are referred to as AI, but in all the ways that matter—how they work, what they’re used for and by whom, and how they fail—they couldn’t be more different.”

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“[All] modern chatbots are actually trained simply to predict the next word in a sequence of words. They generate text by repeatedly producing one word at a time. For technical reasons, they generate a “token” at a time, tokens being chunks of words that are shorter than words but longer than individual letters. They string these tokens together to generate text. When a chatbot begins to respond to you, it has no coherent picture of the overall response it’s about to produce. It instead performs an absurdly large number of calculations to determine what the first word in the response should be. After it has output—say, a hundred words—it decides what word would make the most sense given your prompt together with the first hundred words that it has generated so far. This is, of course, a way of producing text that’s utterly unlike human speech. Even when we understand perfectly well how and why a chatbot works, it can remain mind-boggling that it works at all. Again, we cannot stress enough how computationally expensive all this is. To generate a single token—part of a word—ChatGPT has to perform roughly a trillion arithmetic operations. If you asked it to generate a poem that ended up having about a thousand tokens (i.e., a few hundred words), it would have required about a quadrillion calculations—a million billion.”

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“Once trained, the LLM is ready for inference. Now given some sequence of, say, 100 words, it predicts the most likely 101st word. (Note that the LLM doesn’t know or care about the meaning of those 100 words: To the LLM, they are just a sequence of text.) The predicted word is appended to the input, forming 101 input words, and the LLM then predicts the 102nd word. And so it goes, until the LLM outputs an end-of-text token, stopping the inference. That’s it! An LLM is an example of generative AI. It has learned an extremely complex, ultra-high-dimensional probability distribution over words, and it is capable of sampling from this distribution, conditioned on the input sequence of words. There are other types of generative AI, but the basic idea behind them is the same: They learn the probability distribution over data and then sample from the distribution, either randomly or conditioned on some input, and produce an output that looks like the training data.”

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