
资料简介:
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something 
that reads even superficially like human-written text 
is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? 
And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a 
rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT— 
and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in 
producing what we might consider to be meaningful 
text. I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus 
on the big picture of what’s going on—and while I’ll 
mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply 
into them. (And the essence of what I’ll say applies 
just as well to other current “large language models” 
[LLMs] as to ChatGPT.) 
The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is 
always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a 
“reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so 
far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might 
expect someone to write after seeing what people 
have written on billions of webpages, etc.” 
So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about 
AI is its ability to ”. Imagine scanning billions of 
pages of human-written text (say on the web and in 
digitized books) and finding all instances of this text 
—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of 
the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like 
this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at 
literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense 
“match in meaning”. But the end result is that it 
produces a ranked list of words that might follow, 
together with “probabilities”:
 
                