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Understand how AI learns general knowledge by reading massive amounts of text from the internet
Part of Understanding ChatGPT & Modern AI
Educational content slides
Before ChatGPT answers your question, it spent months reading. Not just reading—analyzing patterns in billions of web pages, books, articles, and code.
Pre-training is when AI learns general knowledge about the world by processing massive text datasets. This is why GPT-4 knows about history, science, culture, and programming without being explicitly taught.
Think of it like getting a general education before specializing.
Test your understanding with this quiz.
ChatGPT can write code in Python, explain history, and help with math—but no one explicitly programmed these abilities. How did it learn them?
Complete this exercise and get AI-powered feedback.
General pre-training gives broad knowledge. Specialized domains need targeted data.
Key question: What would you train on to make AI expert-level in a specific field?