The ability of the internet industry giants to bring about “disruptive” innovations shows no sign of waning. On 30 November 2022, OpenAI — a company co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and supported by Microsoft — announced the release of ChatGPT-3, the application that everyone is currently talking about. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with a generative ability (GPT stands for “Generative Predictive Transformer”) that would pass the Turing test[1] with flying colours, and that amazes most of its users with the fluidity and quality of its responses.
ChatGPT describes itself as being able to “provide factual answers, understand complex topics, solve problems, and perform tasks”. These so-called LLMs (Large Language Models) absorb a vast corpus of texts from the web, notably from Wikipedia, but also from many other websites, thanks to a neural architecture capable of processing 175 billion parameters. They record the words used and those that occur in close proximity, as well as the context in which they occur. On this basis, they generate word sequences according to statistical rules based on the context and the keywords of the question. The model is then optimised during a training phase under human supervision. Ultimately, this application has surprised even its creators with its performance.
It is worth noting the considerable interest it has attracted. The opportunity offered to internet users to test it is said to have attracted more than one million volunteers in a few days, and there is now talk of 100 million test users. Meanwhile, the share price of OpenAI has soar...
