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Analysis and Technology

Why the T in ChatGPT is AI's biggest breakthrough - and greatest risk

AI companies hope that feeding ever more data to their models will continue to boost performance, eventually leading to human-level intelligence. Behind this hope is the "transformer", a key breakthrough in AI, but what happens if it fails to deliver?

By Alex Wilkins

15 August 2024

×îÐÂÂé¶¹ÊÓÆµ. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

A good neural network architecture is vital when developing artificial intelligence

SHUTTERSTOCK/Qpt

When ChatGPT first took the world by storm in 2022, its capabilities were so impressive that people happily looked past its awkward name. Yet hidden within those initials lies a key breakthrough responsible for sending artificial intelligence rocketing these past few years – and potentially a limitation that could see it crashing back to Earth.

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and it is the last word that matters most. The term was coined in a by a team at Google, which introduced a concept called…

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