Software developer Ishan Anand has successfully integrated OpenAI’s predecessor to ChatGPT – GPT-2 – into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Anand’s creation, called ‘Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need’, offers users a hands-on exploration of how large language models (LLMs) work without the need for coding expertise.
Part novel, part educational, Anand’s brainchild lets users enter words into designated cells and receive results in adjacent cells.
GPT-2 is more or less available in Excel
The software developer’s decision to embed GPT-2 in an Excel spreadsheet was based on his curiosity and passion for simplifying artificial intelligence.
Anand revealed that the project actually started with Google Sheets, but the full 124M model was too large, hence the decision to move to Excel. It’s a bit ironic because Microsoft has now started rolling out more updated GPT capabilities across its Microsoft 365 suite of apps, including Excel, through the generative AI Copilot tool. Google also has its own AI assistant, Gemini (formerly Duet AI for Workspace).
However, this feat did not come without its challenges, with Anand having to deal with the intricacies of tokenization and the process of converting words into numerical values.
Despite the added value and potential that can be unlocked by developers, more current projects will not be possible. GPT-2 is available for free from OpenAI as an open-source model, but GPT-3, which first appeared in ChatGPT’s public preview, is closed-source.
Anand’s work uses GPT-2 Small, which uses 124 million parameters. The full release has 1.5 billion parameters, which itself is significantly smaller than its GPT-3 successor.
Enthusiasts looking to delve into its inner workings can access Anand’s creation on GitHub via the websitehowever, some performance issues have been recognized, including possible Mac issues.