ChatGPT is not AI - It's an Expert System

It is often difficult to explain to non-technical people the complexity of modern software. I guess everyone is busy, and most people don't have time to learn the basics of how computers work.<br><br>To understand this concept, you need to first understand what an expert system is. Expert systems have been around for many years, and are built into many applications, including things like TurboTax. <br><br>Here's how it works...<br><br>An expert system consists of a few logical layers. The first is the user interface (UI), where the user interacts with the system. In the case of TurboTax, it's a web page or mobile app. The second is a rules engine, which contains the business logic for the application. In TurboTax, it's the expertise of accountants, IRS rules, tax law, etc. The rules engine is like a large, complex flowchart. It asks a series of yes/no questions, and the like. Each question leads to additional yes/no questions.<br><br>The last layer is a knowledge base. In TurboTax, this is information that is maintained by the software vendor. It's the current tax tables, what your state and local governments require to be reported, etc. In ChatGPT, this is a massive amount of text that has been scraped from across the internet. It's supposed to be the collective knowledge of humanity, with a few filters and editing.<br><br>So when you ask a question using ChatGPT, you've created a session in the application. Each reply you get is the result of the rules engine operating against the knowledge base. If you ask a follow-on question, it's no different than asking a new question, unless you reference something that was previously mentioned. The rules engine will use that as a reference to help guide the answer.<br><br>But the rules engine in ChatGPT, Word, or TurboTax is not intelligent. The knowledge base is not intelligent. It's not a neural network, and it's not a super computer. They are applications that have been built to solve specific problems.<br><br>I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we are not on the cusp of a technological singularity. We are a long, long, long way from achieving true artificial intelligence.