WebGPT
In plain wordsA 2021 OpenAI research system that answered questions by searching and browsing the web in a simple text browser, collecting sources and citing them — an early ancestor of today's research agents.
A GPT-3GPT-3, prop. n.: A huge 2020 OpenAI language model that could perform new tasks simply from instructions or a few examples written into its prompt, without retraining. It made prompting a new way of programming. model that OpenAI trained in 2021 to research and write long answers to open-ended questions with a simplified, text-only web browser: it could search, follow links, scroll, save quotations as references and then compose an answer citing them. Training started from behavioral cloningbehavioral cloning, n.: The simplest way to copy an expert: record what the expert did in each situation and train an AI to predict the same action whenever it sees a similar situation. of people doing the same task and then used a reward modelreward model, n.: A separate AI model trained to score responses the way people would, so it can stand in for human judges while another model is trained on millions of examples. fitted to human comparisons of answers, both for best-of-n rejection samplingrejection sampling, n.: Generating many candidate answers and keeping only those that pass a check — a scoring model, a test or a correct final answer — often so the AI can then be trained on its own best work. and for reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time.. Judged on questions from the ELI5 ('Explain Like I'm Five') set, the best version's answers beat the human demonstrators' 56% of the time and the most-upvoted Reddit replies 69% of the time. WebGPT pioneered browsing with citations and reward modeling for factual long-form answers, ideas later central to search-enabled chatbots and deep researchdeep research, n.: An AI feature that spends minutes rather than seconds on a question — planning, running dozens of web searches, reading many sources — and then writes a long report with citations. agents.
WebGPT already searched, quoted and cited in 2021; today's research agents just do it for an hour.
Origin
Described by Reiichiro Nakano, Jacob Hilton, Suchir Balaji and 15 other OpenAI authors in a paper posted on 17 December 2021.
Related
- browser agentbrowser agent, n.: An AI agent that uses a web browser on your behalf — searching, clicking links, filling in forms and reading pages — to complete tasks such as booking, shopping or gathering information.
- deep researchdeep research, n.: An AI feature that spends minutes rather than seconds on a question — planning, running dozens of web searches, reading many sources — and then writes a long report with citations.
- reinforcement learning from human feedbackreinforcement learning from human feedback, n.: A way of training AI using people's judgments: humans compare pairs of answers, a scoring model learns their preferences, and the AI is then trained to produce answers that score well.
- reward modelreward model, n.: A separate AI model trained to score responses the way people would, so it can stand in for human judges while another model is trained on millions of examples.
- citationcitation, n.: A pointer from something an AI says to the source that supports it — a link, document or quoted passage — so people can check the claim for themselves.
- tool usetool use, n.: An AI model's ability to reach beyond its own knowledge by operating outside tools — searching the web, running code, using a calculator or an app — and folding the results into its work.
Sources
- Nakano, R., Hilton, J., Balaji, S. et al. (2021). WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback. arXiv:2112.09332. arxiv.org/abs/2112.09332
Mentioned in
deep researchdeep research, n.: An AI feature that spends minutes rather than seconds on a question — planning, running dozens of web searches, reading many sources — and then writes a long report with citations., browser agentbrowser agent, n.: An AI agent that uses a web browser on your behalf — searching, clicking links, filling in forms and reading pages — to complete tasks such as booking, shopping or gathering information., tool usetool use, n.: An AI model's ability to reach beyond its own knowledge by operating outside tools — searching the web, running code, using a calculator or an app — and folding the results into its work.