By skyforbes Imagine you’re texting a super-smart friend who knows a little bit about everything, never sleeps, and always has an answer. That’s ChatGPT. But how does it actually work under the hood? Let’s break it down in plain English — no jargon, no PhD required.
🧠 What Is ChatGPT, Really?
ChatGPT is a type of AI called a “language model.” Think of it like a supercharged autocomplete. You know how your phone guesses the next word when you’re typing a message? ChatGPT does that — but with entire paragraphs, stories, code, jokes, and even poetry.
It’s trained to predict the next word in a sentence based on everything it’s seen before. And it’s seen a lot — billions of words from books, websites, articles, and more.
🏋️♂️ How Did It Get So Smart?
ChatGPT didn’t read the internet like a human. Instead, it was trained using a process called machine learning. Here’s a simplified version of how it works:
- Feeding the Beast: Engineers fed the model tons of text — like Wikipedia, news articles, Reddit threads, and books.
- Guessing Game: The model played a game: guess the next word in a sentence. If it got it wrong, it adjusted its internal settings (called “weights”) to do…