Ronaldo & Kids
Simplifying Data

Explaining ChatGPT & AI to 10 year old

My younger one is a big fan of Cristiano Ronaldo, the famous footballer. He recently finished grade 5 and asked me about ChatGPT and generative AI, as well as what I do. Explaining it to him was quite challenging, so I thought about how Ronaldo himself would explain it.

Here's my attempt:

"Hey there, champ! You know how I play football and use my skills to score goals? Well, let me tell you about something cool called a Language Model. It's like having a super-smart teammate for talking!

A Language Model is like a computer program that has learned a lot about how people talk by reading many books and articles. It's just like how I practice a lot to become a better player.

There are different types of Language Models with different skills. Some models, like Word Grams, can guess what words come next in a sentence based on what they've seen before. It's like predicting the next move in a game based on what has happened before.

Other models, like LSTMs (Long Short-Term Memory), are good at understanding context. It's like when I know where my teammates are on the field and make passes accordingly. These models remember important things from earlier in a sentence to understand what's being said.

Now, there are even more advanced models called Transformers. They have a special power called the Attention Mechanism. It's like how I pay attention to my teammates and the game around me. Transformers can focus on important parts of the text and understand how words relate to each other. They're really good at understanding language and making smart decisions.

The most advanced Language Models, like the Large Language Models (LLMs), are like the superstar players in football. They're big models that have learned from lots of text. They can understand language really well and even create new text that sounds like a person wrote it.

Within LLMs, there are two special models: BERT and GPT.

BERT is great at understanding the context of words from both the beginning and end of a sentence. It's like having a teammate who understands the whole story, not just parts of it.

GPT is a model that's amazing at coming up with new text. It's like having a teammate who is really good at being creative and finishing sentences. They can write stories or complete sentences that sound just like a person wrote them.

These Language Models are like having a team of smart friends who can talk about anything we want to know. They're like extra teammates who help us understand and communicate better, just like my teammates help me on the football field.

So, just like I use my skills to play football, these Language Models use their skills to understand and create language. Keep practicing your own skills, and who knows, maybe one day you'll be as good at something as these Language Models are with words!"