What is a GPT and why does it matter?

1/ Generative: It can create or 'generate' new content like text, stories, images, visuals, audio, or answers to questions. Which is pretty cool. These things have always been represented through movies and shows of our imagination, from Knightrider, to Short Circuit, Star Trek, and so much more. And in real life, predictive text, computer translations from one language to another, things like Siri, etc. This action has been around for a while.

2/ Pre-trained: Before you even start chatting with something like ChatGPT, it's already been 'taught' a lot by 'reading/understanding' loads of information (known as Large Language Models or LLM for short), kind of like how you learn things in school before you do your homework. These LLMs are humongous data dumps. People have then spent the time to 'train' the Ai to make the 'correct' predictions. It's just like a giant game of Guess Who, where the Ai pretty much guesses it correctly. However, because it's created by us people it's prone to a few issues here and there from biases and other things. Also, the data set might be corrupt in some ways such as skewed masses of certain samey stuff, which then means the output spews that out. For example, if you ask an Ai to generate a beautiful person image, more likely it'll generate a slim, young, white woman, usually a bit undressed and buxom. And just to make it a bit more fun, sometimes the Ai if it can't find the answer, will just output the wrong answer, these are called hallucinations. All important stuff to be aware of.

3/ Transformer: Not Optimus Prime or Megatron (yet). This is a special way it learns and understands language, helping it make really good guesses about what to say next based on inputs > which are decoded > then encoded and transformed > into the output related to the ask, based on the best guess.