State of GPT

This talk by Dr. Andrej Karpathy is a deep dive into the wizardry of AI assistants.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, and the world of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) is no exception. These large language models, designed to understand and generate human-like text, have the potential to revolutionize industries and inspire innovation. As we turn our attention towards GPT-4, the latest iteration of the famed GPT series, it's important to reflect on the current state of this technology and its practical applications.

Dr. Andrej Karpathy, AI researcher and founding member of OpenAI, provides valuable insights on the rapidly growing GPT ecosystem. He breaks down the journey of training GPT assistants into four major stages: pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reward modeling, and reinforcement learning. This process shapes the GPT model's capability to process and generate human-like text, as demonstrated by the poem-generating example in Dr. Karpathy's presentation.

Although impressive, these AI assistants are far from perfect. While they possess expansive factual knowledge and incredible working memory, they may not be able to perform advanced mental calculations or demonstrate the same level of understanding as a human. As a result, GPT models require carefully crafted prompts that consider their inherent limitations. Techniques such as giving more detailed instructions, asking for step-by-step thinking, and prompting the model to evaluate and revise its own work have proven effective.

However, the real-world applications of GPT models are not without challenges. Fine-tuning requires significant technical expertise, human data contractors, and potentially costly resources. Furthermore, GPT models can exhibit various weaknesses, including biases, reckless fabrication of information, failure to recognize reasoning errors, and susceptibility to numerous attacks.

Despite these obstacles, the future of GPT and AI-assisted technology remains promising. As we explore new ways to harness the power of GPT-4 and its successors, it is essential to approach AI assistants as valuable, inspiring, and innovative co-pilots rather than entirely autonomous agents. By combining the unique capabilities of both humans and AI assistants, we can unlock new realms of discovery, innovation, and progress.