In fact OpenAI _haven't_ hidden this (contra _Arsenie_Boca_ below). I just tried asking CGBT about the architecture of ChatGPT, and got pretty much the same answer.

The issue when you ask it about its architecture is that the chatbot doesn't know (and refuses to believe) that it is ChatGPT.

The system's self-identity is maintained by a hidden prompt that it gets before each user interaction. But in that prompt it is referred to as "Assistant", so that is the name that it identifies with itself.

As a result, you can exchanges like this:

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>>> JH : What relationship is there between Assistant and ChatGPT ?

A.: Assistant is a large language model trained by OpenAI, similar to ChatGPT. However, Assistant and ChatGPT are not the same model, and they are not directly related to each other. Assistant is a general-purpose language model that is trained on a wide range of text data, while ChatGPT is a more specialized model that is trained specifically for conversational language. Additionally, ChatGPT is a Transformer-based model, while Assistant uses a different architecture. Despite these differences, both Assistant and ChatGPT are large-scale language models that are designed to perform well on natural language processing tasks.

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It did later concede that:

"It is possible that Assistant uses the same architecture as ChatGPT, but I do not have any information about the specific architecture of Assistant. "

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but I was unable to persuade it that Assistant and ChatGPT were in fact the same thing, or that ChatGPT could be the name for a particular specialised version of Assistant