One way to improve your skills with AI — and subsequently save gobs of time — is to familiarize yourself with how these technologies work.

Did you know that the “GPT” in ChatGPT isn’t just a name? It’s a type of technology.

I asked GPT to explain what it means to a non-technical audience. Here’s the reply: 

GPT stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” 

Let's break it down:

1. Generative: It means that the model has the ability to generate text or other forms of output. In the case of ChatGPT, it can generate human-like responses to prompts or questions.

2. Pre-trained: Before being used for specific tasks, such as answering questions in a chat-based format, the model is trained on a large dataset. This training process helps the model learn patterns, grammar, and context from the text it is exposed to.

3. Transformer: The transformer is a type of neural network architecture that plays a key role in GPT models. It enables the model to understand the relationships and dependencies between words in a piece of text. Transformers have been successful in various natural language processing tasks, including language translation, summarization, and question answering.

So, ChatGPT is an instance of the GPT model that has been specifically designed to generate responses in a conversational manner. It leverages pre-training and the transformer architecture to understand and generate text based on the input it receives.