Generative AI : How Do AI Chatbots Work?

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."

And the remarkable thing is that when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again "given the text so far, what should the next word be?"—and each time adding a word.

Wolfram, S. (2023, February 14). What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? Writings. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

This three-part series by Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology explains Large Language Models, including how training leads to predictive text capabilities, how developers fine-tune LLMs, and how predictive text can generate more than just words.