Demystifying LLMs and ChatGPT

Over the last several months, the release of Bing’s AI Chatbot “Sydney”, Meta’s Galactica—pulled after 3 days—and Google’s Bard—currently available only to a small number of people, talk of LLMs continues to reach a fever pitch. But it is the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT that made especially notable waves in the tech world, with a staggering 1 million+ users within its first week of launch.

What actually is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot powered by artificial intelligence and developed by OpenAI, a US tech startup. It's based on GPT-3, a language model released in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce human-like text, but the underlying LLM technology has been around much longer.

The (R)evolution of LLMs

An LLM is where an algorithm has been trained using vast amounts of text-based data, most often this is collecting via scraping techniques from across the internet, covering web pages and - depending on the LLM - other sources such as news articles, scientific research, books or social media posts. This covers such a large volume of data that it becomes nearly impossible to filter all inaccurate or offensive content at ingest, and so 'controversial' content is likely to be included in its model. The algorithms analyse the relationships between different words and convert this into a probability model. It is then possible to give the algorithm a 'prompt' (for example, by asking it a question), and it will provide an answer based on the relationships of the words in its model.

Reading between the (command) lines to improve the CX (customer experience)

Traditional search engines like Google or Bing match specific words at an individual level from a query with the words in a large index of content, but LLMs effectively understand the meaning of words, and can retrieve more relevant content. With the advent of LLM-based chatbots and virtual assistants, customers can now interact with businesses in a more natural and conversational manner. This has been a significant step forward in providing a better CX throughout the customer journey. As a result, LLMs have become a go-to solution for companies looking to enhance their customer support, sales and marketing efforts.