[ryandrake]

Checking in with the same feeling. If I had to do an interview and they asked me to sketch out on a whiteboard a high level diagram of how anything from the last 20 years of computing worked, I could probably muddle my way through it. A 3D engine, a database, a word processor, a web site with a REST API, you name it. It might not be 100% right in the details, but I could at least describe it in the general sense and talk about the constraints of such a system.

If you held a gun to my head and asked me to tell you even at a sky-high architectural level (let alone in any detail) how ChatGPT worked, well... tell my family I love them. This is the first time in my 20+ year career I have felt like some computing thing is total unexplainable black magic.

[DougN7]

It’s OK. From what I’ve read, nobody actually knows how it works. I mean we know we have layers and weights, but how those emit what looks like intelligence is not understood by anyone.