Why the T in ChatGPT is AI’s biggest breakthrough – and greatest risk

When ChatGPT first took the world by storm in 2022, its capabilities were so impressive that people happily looked past its awkward name. Yet hidden within those initials lies a key breakthrough responsible for sending artificial intelligence rocketing these past few years – and potentially a limitation that could see it crashing back to Earth.

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and it is the last word that matters most. The term was coined in a 2017 paper by a team at Google, which introduced a concept called…