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What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? Paperback – March 9, 2023

by Stephen Wolfram (Author)

1,229 ratings

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Nobody expected this—not even its creators: ChatGPT has burst onto the scene as an AI capable of writing at a convincingly human level. But how does it really work? What's going on inside its "AI mind"? In this short book, prominent scientist and computation pioneer Stephen Wolfram provides a readable and engaging explanation that draws on his decades-long unique experience at the frontiers of science and technology. Find out how the success of ChatGPT brings together the latest neural net technology with foundational questions about language and human thought posed by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago.

From the Publisher

"This is an important book... Wolfram has provided a substantial contribution to the body of thought on AI."

— Verified Purchaser

"This is the best explanation of what ChatGPT is doing that I've seen."

— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT)

"Very clear and concise explanation of AI via ChatGPT and neural nets. Well written and not hard to grasp for a quick read."

— Verified Purchaser

From the Preface

"This short book is an attempt to explain from first principles how and why ChatGPT works. In some ways it's a story about technology. But it's also a story about science. As well as about philosophy. And to tell the story, we'll have to bring together a remarkable range of ideas and discoveries made across many centuries.

For me it's exciting to see so many things I've so long been interested in come together in a burst of sudden progress. From the complex behavior of simple programs to the core character of language and meaning, and the practicalities of large computer systems—all of these are part of the ChatGPT story."

It's Just Adding One Word at a Time · Where Do the Probabilities Come From? · What Is a Model? · Models for Human-Like Tasks · Neural Nets · Machine Learning, and the Training of Neural Nets · The Practice and Lore of Neural Net Training · "Surely a Network That's Big Enough Can Do Anything!" · The Concept of Embeddings · Inside ChatGPT · The Training of ChatGPT · Beyond Basic Training · What Really Lets ChatGPT Work? · Meaning Space and Semantic Laws of Motion · Semantic Grammar and the Power of Computational Language · So ... What Is ChatGPT Doing, and Why Does It Work? · Thanks

Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

ChatGPT and Wolfram|Alpha · A Basic Example · A Few More Examples · The Path Forward

Additional Resources

About the Author

Stephen Wolfram is an award-winning scientist and bestselling author, and the creator of some of the world's most respected software systems—Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language. For more than 35 years, he has been CEO of the global technology company Wolfram Research, as well as responsible for a series of groundbreaking advances in basic science, including the recent Wolfram Physics Project.

A few of Stephen Wolfram's other books:

Predicting the Eclipse: A Multimillennium Tale of Computation
An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, Third Edition
The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics
Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People
A New Kind of Science

	What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?	An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language	Hands-on Start to Wolfram Mathematica and Programming with the Wolfram Language	Hands-on Start to Wolfram\|Alpha Notebook Edition	Query: Getting Information from Data with the Wolfram Language	Introduction to Machine Learning

Customer Reviews	1,229	36	259	14	11	26
Price	$11.89	$20.24	$39.95	$29.95	$31.74	$24.91
Page Count	112	376	572	280	368	424
Wolfram Language Programming Level	Intermediate examples	Beginner	Beginner	Beginner	Intermediate	Intermediate

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is the best explanation of what ChatGPT is doing that I've seen."

-Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT)

About the Author

Stephen Wolfram is an award-winning scientist and bestselling author, and the creator of some of the world's most respected software systems—Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language. For more than 35 years, he has been CEO of the global technology company Wolfram Research, as well as responsible for a series of groundbreaking advances in basic science, including the recent Wolfram Physics Project.www.stephenwolfram.com

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wolfram Media Inc.
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 9, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 102 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1579550819
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1579550813
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.9 x 0.3 x 8.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #32,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7 in Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition
- #20 in Natural Language Processing (Books)
- #56 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics

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Stephen Wolfram

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Stephen Wolfram has had a unique trajectory in science, technology and business. Widely known for his discoveries in basic science and his groundbreaking 2002 book "A New Kind of Science," he has spent more than three decades building what is now Wolfram Language: the knowledge-based computer language that powers Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha and has contributed to countless inventions and discoveries, as well as to the education of several generations of students.

Wolfram was born in London and educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, earning his PhD in physics in 1979 at the age of 20. After a brief but distinguished academic career, he founded Wolfram Research in 1987 and as CEO has built it into one of the world’s most respected and innovative software companies, whose products are relied on by millions of people around the world.

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Customers appreciate the book's simplified explanations of ChatGPT and find it concise and effective. Moreover, the visual style receives positive feedback, with one customer noting its well-illustrated content. However, the accuracy aspect receives criticism, with several customers pointing out that ChatGPT is poor at math.

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Information quality Effectiveness Visual style Chatgpt accuracy

44 customers mention "Information quality"41 positive3 negative

Customers appreciate the book's information quality, praising its masterful simplified explanations of ChatGPT and its concise format.

"...with large language models, Dr. Wolfram provides a clear concise explanation of how LLMs came into being, how they work, the class of problems that..." Read more

"...expression factoring, equation solving, graphing, and full differential and integral calculus, and to top it off, rule-based logic and far more...." Read more

"...high general intelligence based on superior memory, superior skills with written language, and superior use of computational thinking...." Read more

"Look, Wolfram is clearly a very smart guy. Mathematica is an awesome accomplishment...." Read more

4 customers mention "Effectiveness"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book effective, with one noting that the results can be surprisingly powerful.

"...It's amazing it works so well." Read more

"...The results can be surprisingly powerful...." Read more

"...This is useful, but it seems a bit self-serving; like advertising for himself." Read more

"...It does this astonishingly well. But it has no ontology, no model of reality, so can easily be coaxed into elementary mistakes." Read more

3 customers mention "Visual style"3 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the visual style of the book, with one mentioning its well-illustrated content and another noting its elegant presentation.

"...including complex algebra expression factoring, equation solving, graphing, and full differential and integral calculus, and to top it off, rule-..." Read more

"...He has included code snippets, pictures, and examples of the cybernetic neural net that is the engine of this technological breakthrough...." Read more

"...Short, well-illustrated, and always to the point, you'll be led by the hand through every level of development and function in an easy-to-understand..." Read more

7 customers mention "Chatgpt accuracy"0 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed views on ChatGPT's accuracy: some find it horrible at math, while one customer notes it isn't precise.

"...is based on normalize probabilities and it has no understanding of what it outputs. It's amazing it works so well." Read more

"...He explains how ChatGPT isn't precise, just like humans...." Read more

"...2. He does a poor job of explaining ChatGPT except in the most cursory of fashion. 3...." Read more

"Overly complex and arrogantly presented material. Outdated now anyway. Do no buy." Read more

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This is an important book.
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2024
Verified Purchase

A most distinguished member of the academy, Steven Wolfram has provided a substantial contribution to the body of thought on AI.

As the world is agog with the mystery, potential, risk, and opportunity associated with large language models, Dr. Wolfram provides a clear concise explanation of how LLMs came into being, how they work, the class of problems that they address, the large class of problems that they will not address, and the extent to which they are inexplicable.

AI changes everything and Generative AI significantly accelerates that change. Fueled by the advent of LLM’s, AI has moved to the top of the agenda of though leaders in the academy, industry, and government.

We are seeing innovative, previously unimaginable breakthrough applications of LLMs introduced daily. The scope of the application of these models to change the way we work, communicate, administer, and entertain is staggeringly large and unknowably vast.

As you attempt to parse the cacophony of messaging from the large and growing chorus of technology providers, politicians, media, opportunists, charlatans, fear mongers, and pundits regarding LLMs, Dr. Wolfram ‘s book will provide you a solid grounding of what this stuff really is, what it can do, and – importantly -- what it cannot do.

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7 people found this helpful

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Quantum Buff
ChatGPT is Horrible at Math; Pair it with Wolfram Alpha!
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2023
Verified Purchase
First of all, as a true techie, I love Wolfram's work, not the physics, but his elegant, refreshing and bold contribution to mathematics and creating tools to bring that complexity to everybody. His first go at it, Mathematica put so many modes of computation on one's desktop as a standalone. This includes ultra high precision (seemingly un-limited digits), way powerful symbolic calculations including complex algebra expression factoring, equation solving, graphing, and full differential and integral calculus, and to top it off, rule-based logic and far more.
You have to wait until the later chapters for it, but after explaining the brain-dead simplicity of neural network "learning", he figuratively destroys ChatGPT, dismembering it, and thrusting its flaws at the reader's face for all to see. I found it shocking, but most fascinating, as he describes why fixing ChatGPT's Achilles heel will be near impossible and certainly not worth the effort.
ChatGPT which works on such a brute force simple single principle, neural net weightings, can never be a match for real intelligence crafted into a product. I love geniuses who later in life wax philosophical (If you do, check out Irwin Schrodinger's "What is Life" and his [20 years later] "My View of the World". Steven Wolfram is definitely a computational genius, with a divine gift of designing, creating, and polishing the highest mathematical tools, and then giving them to the world. As such he is entitled to wax philosophical, too.
As a religious Jew, and I think anyone religious would agree, no amount of appending the most fitting next nucleotide into a string of DNA will produce something as complex as a housefly, all the more so a human - sorry Darwin. All the top NASA engineers and scientists can not come close to the fly's taking and landing ability on any angled surface, its ability to evade capture by a human being by quickly seeing and evaluating trajectories 100's of times per second, its ability see in a myriad of directions simultaneously, its getting its energy from simple waste materials, and its manufacturing ability to replicate thousands of itself from those same materials in record time.

Steven Wolfram has thus done humanity a great service. Fear no longer. This wave of AI is brain dead and will not take over the world, not with its lack of the most elementary mathematical, or even arithmetical ability.

As I thank Steven Wolfram for his perfectionist products, and enjoy reading his books large and small, I hope he will understand that to my mind, he has made it clear that, in the most similar way, his taking down of ChatGPT by exposing its limitations of its simple technique of choosing the best 'atom' to append, he has, in one glorious stroke, also eviscerated Darwin and exposed the extreme stupidity of believing that random mutations plus survival of the fittest (picking the most fitting next DNA 'letter') can ever compete with an alternative such as truly thoughtful and intelligent crafting and designing.

Wolfram refreshingly blurts out the truth. I agree and will close, sharing that expecting Darwin's theory to produce life is now as foolish as expecting ChatGPT to calculate numbers, to take one example, to calculate Pi to even a few dozen places, a task Wolfram's tools now can all do in a split second.
To also put it bluntly, after reading "What Is ChatGPT doing ... and Why Does It Work?" , knee jerk use of science or technology to defend atheism, is no longer an effective option.

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84 people found this helpful

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Alldeck
Some Computational Training
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2023
Verified Purchase
A person is rated as having high general intelligence based on superior memory, superior skills with written language, and superior use of computational thinking. Now the first two are being executed somewhat unreliably by an upgraded pattern completion device, the transformer. This device depends on the artificial neural network, invented only slightly more recently than the stored program digital computer, itself.

Stephen Wolfram, who is well known for adapting language to computational thinking, wrote a good introduction aimed at someone who knows at least a little about the technology. Nevertheless, the slog is hard through engineering embellishments like embedding, attention, positional marking, and connection dropping. The software is a true black box, in any case. It happens to work. But there is little to gain by contemplating the billions of processing elements and hundreds of billions of connections. You might as well try to understand the mystery of intelligent life by contemplating the electrochemical complexity of grey matter.

Stephen Wolfram wishes to tame the gpt technology by interfacing it to his precisely defined tools for computation. He shows clearly that ChatCPT is unreliable when faced with something even slightly computational. The hope is that the transformer will benefit from the disciplines of Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica. I look forward to following the progress here. But as a retiree , I think I'll stay directly with the human generated, edited, and referenced articles of Wikipedia.

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14 people found this helpful

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David Jameson
The explanation turned into an advertisement for how great is Mathematica/Wolfram
Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2024
Verified Purchase
Look, Wolfram is clearly a very smart guy. Mathematica is an awesome accomplishment. But Wolfram needs to stop hinting to everybody about how smart he is.
He gives a rather basic example of how neural networks work but leaves out very important details in his examples (for example, why this number of hidden layers vs. that number of hidden layers). He then goes on to show how ChatGPT gets things wrong by basically showing that Wolfram/Alpha gets them right.
Nothing he says is wrong but, to paraphrase the comedians catch line, “it’s the way he says it”

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5 people found this helpful

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Michal Kutyla
Very good overview of how LLMs work.
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2024
Verified Purchase
I really enjoyed reading this book. I know there is a free blog post with the same content, but books are easier for me to digest than blogs when it comes to long texts. I definitely understand the technology better now.
Some cons:
* Kindle version is not great. It's ok to read it on smartphone but not on Kindle. Some images are difficult to see.
* Transformers could be explained better
* Author tries to plug his product, Wolfram|Alpha, a little bit too much.

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GDKWI
Tout comprendre du fonctionnement interne de ChatGPT
Reviewed in France on March 13, 2024
Verified Purchase

Assez technique mais passionnant pour les aficionados !
Avec en prime des réflexions sur ce que tout ça nous enseigne du fctnnmt du cerveau.

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Peppe
Eccellente per capire come funziona chat GPT
Reviewed in Italy on December 7, 2024
Verified Purchase
Libro eccellente per un approfondimento di come funzionano i LLM senza entrare nel dettaglio della programmazione. Ottimo per persone

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Jose J_D
Interesting book, ...but not so easy
Reviewed in Spain on December 27, 2023
Verified Purchase
This book is written by a person who has been working on AI and has been somewhat surprised by the success of Chatgpt. It is certainly worth reading, but a certain level of expertise on computation theory is necessary to understand it fully. Interesting to see the limitations of Chatgpt and LLM models. I think it is very good, but the title is a little misleading (that is why I do not give 5 *)

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Zbigniew Filek
"It was a dark and stormy..." What's the next word?
Reviewed in Canada on May 11, 2025
Verified Purchase
Mr. Wolfram is a top expert: A well known mathematician, creator of the "Mathematica" software. This book is a must read for anybody who worries about the future of the world with AI, or who wants to invest in it. I am a retired computer engineer, but even people without technical background can vastly benefit from reading it while passing over more technical parts. LLMs (Large Language Models) are at the heart of the Generative AI. Reading the book let's you understand that LLMs basically given any piece of text estimate the probabilities of next word in that text. This is a great achievement, since number of possibilities is astronomical. But it lets you understand, that a text step-by-step created by the software is kind of average of everything that was ever written on the subject and consumed by chatGPT in the learning phase. To me it means that ChatGPT is a "Rumour Machine" or a plagiarism creator but not from a single source, but from millions of them at the same time. It also means that to me there is no intelligence whatever involved and that for a question it would give a most popular answer instead of a correct answer. Many people do not agree with this estimate - I had many heated discussions on the subject. Read the book and decide for yourself.

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Jonas
Interesting Details about how Chat gpt works
Reviewed in Germany on August 14, 2023
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I wanted to know in reasonable depth how ChatGPT can do what it does. For me the book hits a sweet spot of being detailed enough to understand very well what's going on, but high level enough to be understood without a machine learning university degree.

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Top reviews from the United States

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5.0 out of 5 stars This is an important book.

4.0 out of 5 stars ChatGPT is Horrible at Math; Pair it with Wolfram Alpha!

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Computational Training

3.0 out of 5 stars The explanation turned into an advertisement for how great is Mathematica/Wolfram

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good overview of how LLMs work.

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Tout comprendre du fonctionnement interne de ChatGPT

5.0 out of 5 stars Eccellente per capire come funziona chat GPT

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book, ...but not so easy

5.0 out of 5 stars "It was a dark and stormy..." What's the next word?

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Details about how Chat gpt works

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This is an important book.

ChatGPT is Horrible at Math; Pair it with Wolfram Alpha!

Some Computational Training

The explanation turned into an advertisement for how great is Mathematica/Wolfram

Very good overview of how LLMs work.

Tout comprendre du fonctionnement interne de ChatGPT

Eccellente per capire come funziona chat GPT

Interesting book, ...but not so easy

"It was a dark and stormy..." What's the next word?

Interesting Details about how Chat gpt works