Given the growing importance of AI literacy, we decided to write this tutorial to help narrow the gap between the discourse among those who study language models -- the core technology underlying ChatGPT and similar products -- and those who are intrigued and want to learn more about them. In short, we believe the perspective of researchers and educators can add some clarity to the public's understanding of the technologies beyond what's currently available, which tends to be either extremely technical or promotional material generated about products by their purveyors. Our approach teases apart the concept of a language model from products built on them, from the behaviors attributed to or desired from those products, and from claims about similarity to human cognition. As a starting point, we (1) offer a scientific viewpoint that focuses on questions amenable to study through experimentation; (2) situate language models as they are today in the context of the research that led to their development; and (3) describe the boundaries of what is known about the models at this writing.

翻译：鉴于人工智能素养日益重要，我们编写本教程以缩小研究语言模型（ChatGPT及类似产品的核心技术）的学者与对此感兴趣并希望深入了解的公众之间的知识鸿沟。简言之，我们相信研究人员和教育者的视角有助于公众更清晰地理解这些技术，从而超越当前要么极其技术化、要么由产品推广者生成的宣传材料。我们的方法将语言模型的概念与基于其构建的产品、这些产品被赋予或期望的行为、以及关于其与人类认知相似性的主张区分开来。作为起点，我们(1)提供一种科学视角，聚焦于可通过实验研究的问题；(2)将当今的语言模型置于其发展历程的研究背景中；(3)描述在撰写本文时已知的模型边界。