# ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ted Chiang]] - Full Title: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Document Tags: [[favorite]] - Summary: ChatGPT is an AI program that identifies statistical regularities in text, compresses them, and presents the resulting approximation in grammatical form. This is similar to lossy compression used for photos, audio, and video where accuracy is not crucial. However, compression artifacts may occur and are often nonsensical answers to factual questions. Large-language models like ChatGPT are not suitable for tasks that require precise information, but they may be useful for repackaging information on the web into a blurry version. - URL: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > What I’ve described sounds a lot like ChatGPT, or most any other large-language model. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnhttz3wpsvnsn798r4nedgt))