AI is Here to Stay: A Q&A with Jon Oakes

In the dark King Library Experiential Virtual Reality (KLEVR) Lab on the fourth floor of San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, the only light is emanating from cracks in the curtain and the glow of the computer screen. Jon Oakes, the technology coordinator for the SJSU King Library, clicks to expand the ChatGPT window. On the left side of his screen is a stack of virtual chats, some experiments while other chat messages are task-oriented. 

What is ChatGPT? Ask ChatGPT and it will respond that it is a conversational artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI. It is a state-of-the-art language model that has been trained on a massive amount of text data from the Internet and has the ability to generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions. ChatGPT is designed to provide answers to questions, summarize information and generate creative text. It has applications in customer service, virtual assistance, and many other areas where quick and accurate information is needed.

However, according to Oakes, “it makes connections among ideas the way our brain does, or similarly to how our memory works — but it doesn’t think or process all the time. It’s only instantiated based on a prompt that you give it. The prompt basically frames the question and then applies it to the model and creates these vectors of math through the model with a trail of tokens that are words and letters that actually mean something relevant to the prompt it was given. It doesn’t actually think for itself, but it can respond in a way that is very convincing that it does.”

By Lesley Seacrist

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