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Re: [TowerTalk] ChatGPT

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] ChatGPT
From: Christian Kennedy <chris@af6ap.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 16:20:08 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>

On 4/5/23 12:53, John Webster NN1SS wrote:
Is anyone here using ChatGPT in the context of amateur radio? Potential use
cases would be design of antennas and tower installations, software code
generation, problem solving, etc. If so, what do you do with it?

It's probably useful to recall what the "GPT" in ChatGPT stands for -- Generative Pretrained Transformer; GPTs are a particularly effective  form of long-term memory that's useful for making predictions regarding patterns.  ChatGPT has zero semantic knowledge; in essence it's a text prediction engine that's been trained on a massive corpus of text (apparently including code scraped off of github); what it pukes out in response to your input text is, literally the statistically most probable outcome based on the sequence of tokens that it produced by shredding your input text.  Of course if that's all it did the results would be both dry and deterministic, so GPTs incorporate the notion of "temperature"; at any given point in constructing an output string it has a list of candidate words based on what it's already output, ranked by probability, but then it perturbs the probability so it doesn't always produce the same text.  Because each output token affects the probability of what comes next, the result is different (occasionally very different) output strings for the same input.

GPTs can be entertaining, and for narrow domains can be useful, but as autocomplete systems with zero understanding of what they're spewing, they can also be thought of as incredible bullshit generators.  Worse, their predictions become part of their corpus, and competing GPT systems have started scraping each other, resulting in a sort of exponential bullshit amplification phenomena that has required some tamping down.

My suggesting is that you use it to get into the game, but always go back to primary sources and do your own work.

--
Christian Kennedy, Ph.D.
chris@af6ap.com AF6AP | DB00000692 | PG00029419
http://www.af6ap.com    PGP KeyID F41EEAEC
PGP fingerprint: 3C92 94A1 F607 2758 CC06  E9C3 59E1 79DD F41E EAEC

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