A brief analysis of ChatGPT： historical evolution， current applications， and future prospects
摘要
近年来，人工智能技术接连取得突破，尤其是在强化学习、大规模语言模型和人工智能生成内容技术等方面，正逐步成为各个行业的创新驱动力。OpenAI于2022年11月30日发布的ChatGPT由于具有惊人的自然语言理解和生成能力，引起全社会大范围的关注，成为全球热议的话题，并被广泛应用于各个行业。仅两个月后，ChatGPT的月活跃用户数便达1亿，成为史上用户数增长最快的消费者应用。鉴于ChatGPT目前造成的影响，对其进行全面的分析较为必要。本文从历史沿革、应用现状和前景展望这3个角度对ChatGPT进行剖析，探究其对社会的影响、技术的原理和挑战以及未来发展的可能性，并从模型能力的角度简要介绍GPT-4相对于ChatGPT的改进。作为一个现象级技术产品，从技术角度而言ChatGPT对相关领域具有里程碑式的重要意义，从应用角度而言其可能会给人类社会带来巨大的影响。ChatGPT有潜力成为计算机领域最伟大的成就之一。但就目前而言，ChatGPT仍然存在一些局限，尚未达到强人工智能的水平。在当前阶段，研究人员需要对人工智能技术持有自信和谦虚学习的态度，继续发展相关的技术研究和应用。;Artificial intelligence（AI）technology has been developing intensively，especially for such scenarios in relevance to its applications of 1）natural language processing，2）computer vision，3）recommendation systems，and 4）forecast analysis. AI technology has been challenging for human cognition over the past decade. In recent years，natural language processing techniques can be focused on more. ChatGPT，as a case of emerging generative AI technology，is launched in December of 2022. ChatGPT，as an advanced language model，is commonly used on the basis of its a）larger model sizes，b）advanced pre-training methods，c）faster computing resources，and d）more language processing tasks. This ChatGPT-related literature review is focused on its（1）public awareness and application status，（2）characteristics， （3）mechanisms，（4）scalability，（5）challenges and limitations，（6）future development and application prospects，and （7）improvements of GPT-4 relative to ChatGPT. Cognitive computing and AI-based ChatGPT can be as a sort of language model in terms of the Transformer architecture and Generative Pre-Training（GPT）. This GPT-trained model can be related to natural language processing，which can predict the probability distribution of the next token using a multi-layer Transformer to generate natural language text. It can be outreached by training the learned language patterns on a large corpus of text. The OpenAI’s language model has shown a significant improvement in their level of intelligence from GPT-1（117 million