Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
Back in the day (and by "in the day," I mean late 2022, before AI chatbots exploded on the scene), tools like Google and Wolfram Alpha interacted with users via a single-line text entry field and provided text results. Google returned search results -- a list of web pages and articles that would (hopefully) provide information related to the search queries. Wolfram Alpha generally provided answers that were mathematical and data analysis-related.
ChatGPT, by contrast, provides a response based on the context and intent behind a user's question. Google, of course, has changed up its response mode. It now provides AI-based responses before search results, and it's likely to continue to do so. Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, uses AI behind the scenes to help it with its calculations but does not provide AI-based answers.
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Fundamentally, Google's searching power is its ability to do enormous database lookups and provide a series of matches. Wolfram Alpha's power is its ability to parse data-related questions and perform calculations.
ChatGPT's power (and that of almost any other AI chatbot, like Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google Gemini) is the ability to parse queries and produce fully fleshed-out answers and results based on most of the world's digitally accessible text-based information. Some chatbots have restrictions based on when they stopped scanning information, but most can now access the live Internet to factor current data into their answers.
In this article, we'll see how ChatGPT can produce those fully fleshed-out answers using a technology called generative artificial intelligence. We'll start by looking at the main phases of ChatGPT operation, then cover some core AI architecture components that make it all work.
The two main phases of ChatGPT operation
Let's use Google Search (as distinguished from Google Gemini AI) as an analogy again. When you ask Google Search to look up something, you probably know that it doesn't -- at the moment you ask -- go out and scour the entire web for answers. Instead, Google searches its database for pages that match that request. Google search has two main phases: the spidering and data-gathering phase, and the user interaction/lookup phase.
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