philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

ChatGPT’s ancestor GPT-2 jammed into 1.25GB Excel sheet — LLM runs inside a spreadsheet that you can download from GitHub

[PhilNote: This 10 minute video, embedded in this story, gives a VERY CLEAR explanation, using spreadsheets, of how ChatGPT works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeN5tXMnJ8&t=587s ]

Software developer and self-confessed spreadsheet addict Ishan Anand has jammed GPT-2 into Microsoft Excel. More astonishingly, it works – providing insight into how large language models (LLMs) work, and how the underlying Transformer architecture goes about its smart next-token prediction. "If you can understand a spreadsheet, then you can understand AI," boasts Anand. The 1.25GB spreadsheet has been made available on GitHub for anyone to download and play with.

Naturally, this spreadsheet implementation of GPT-2 is somewhat behind the LLMs available in 2024, but GPT-2 was state-of-the-art and grabbed plenty of headlines in 2019. It is important to remember that GPT-2 is not something to chat with, as it comes from before the 'chat' era.  ...

... it is still good for a demo and Anand claims that his "low-code introduction" is ideal as an LLM grounding for the likes of tech execs, marketers, product managers, AI policymakers, ethicists, as well as for developers and scientists who are new to AI. Anand asserts that this same Transformer architecture remains "the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many other LLMs." ...

See the full story with explanatory 10 minute video here: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpts-ancestor-gpt-2-jammed-into-125gb-excel-sheet-llm-runs-inside-a-spreadsheet-that-you-can-download-from-github?ref=trailyn.com