49. What Transformers Are (Text and Sequences)
49.4 Where ChatGPT Fits
Why. Students jump straight to ChatGPT. Draw the boundary clearly.
What. ChatGPT-like tools are large transformer decoders trained on huge corpora + alignment. Your tiny classifier is the teaching on-ramp, not a competitor.
How.
Pick the right lane
- Need a small on-device spam flag on 5k tickets → classical or tiny net.
- Need conversational help / RAG over PDFs → Gen AI course.
- Need vision shelf checks → CNN chapters.
print("Tiny classifier ≠ ChatGPT")
print("Same family idea (attention), very different scale and purpose")
Bridge
Chapter 54 and the Gen AI course expand “NLP vs ChatGPT” for production chat use cases.