GPT-3 — let’s define it as the autocomplete tool by OpenAI trained on a large amount of uncategorized text from the internet — is quite impressive, comparable to what happened to AI image processing from 2012 onward. We can safely ignore the hype — it’s probably a dead end in terms of reaching artificial general intelligence (see its performance on the Turing Test). And I doubt it’s going to replace developers. But as an autocomplete, at guessing common sense or trivia questions, it’s a leap forward. Here I am asking Alexa for the third time to lower the volume, and this thing can almost handle a conversation.
Anyway because of how it works (you give it some text, a prompt, and it guesses what comes next) in recent weeks the internet got inundated with things they made GPT-3 do. There’s even a course in creative writing taught by GPT-3 (which is probably as valid as most creative writing courses).
Here’s its reply when prompted by Arram Sabeti to write an essay on human intelligence:
I propose that intelligence is the ability to do things humans do. [..] The brain is a very bad computer, consciousness is a very bad idea.
