My Review of "What is ChatGPT doing and Why Does It Work" by Stephen Wolfram

What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This books aims to provide a clear, plain English layman's terms explanation of how ChatGPT works.
I am not very sure how well it achieves its goal. I heard about neural nets when I was an undergraduate studying computer engineering in the early 2000's. Back then the term "AI" was not used in engineering research unless you wanted to not get funding. In Grad School "Pattern Recognition" was the name of the class that taught neural nets as an after thought right after liner regression, and SVM's (Support Vector Machines).
Anyway, I did enjoy reading this book, I learned a few insights, and I was able to get intuitions about why it's hard to explain. I studied "Machine Learning" at the University of Washington in 2015 and I was up to date until ChatGPT. As a person who has used ChatGPT at work (made a cool prototype in a hackathon) I didn't know how they made it work so well. This book offered a good explanation.
Stephen Wolfram is a tad pompous, and sometimes I got lost in the details, but overall this is a good book for anyone with enough curiosity.

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