The question
How exactly is GenAI working? Without a technical explanation, just to understand the concept. Did give it some thought and provided that to ChatGPT to see if it would agree ;-). My input to ChatGPT:
"A question for you, ChatGPT… how do you actually work? My impression is that you come across as endlessly smart because you know so much. And by constantly combining things from the enormous amount of data you have at your disposal, you appear intelligent and wise. At the same time, is it correct to say that you mainly reason based on the data you have? Or do you also have truly original insights?"
It did come back with a pretty nice nuanced answer that helped me understand!
ChatGPT's Reply
I can best explain it in three layers:
1. My “Knowledge”
I don’t have internet access or an endless database in my head, but I was trained on a vast amount of text from books, articles, websites, code examples, and more.
That training allows me to recognize patterns: how people write, reason, and solve problems. It’s not a literal storage of facts like an encyclopedia, but rather a network of connections between words, concepts, and contexts.
2. My “Thinking”
When you ask me something, I don’t literally search my memory. Instead, I generate a response step by step by calculating which words and sentences are most likely to follow.
Because I do this with billions of parameters that detect relationships, I can:
- Combine information across different domains (for example,physics and philosophy).
- Create analogies that may never have appeared in my trainingdata.
- Reason in new scenarios, as long as the parts align withpatterns I already know.
3. Original Insights?
This part is tricky.
- Yes, sometimes: I can form connections or solutionsthat were never explicitly in my training data. This happens through combinationand abstraction — much like humans sometimes invent something “new” bymixing familiar things.
- But: I don’t experience emotions, I don’t haveintuition or consciousness. My originality comes from pattern recognition, notfrom lived experience.
You could say:
I’m not a source of completely new creations inthe way a human suddenly feels something and writes it down. But I can generatesurprising, useful, and creative combinations that feel original.