I’m no stranger to hyperbole. Excitedly calling 1,900 different things the “Greatest. Idea. Ever!” will do that to you. But right now, I’m not the only one losing my shit over GPT-3. Seemingly everyone is. For we are on the verge of a new era of Artificial Intelligence, one in which programmers become obsolete – replaced by a simple text box that carries out our every wish and desire.
Unless you have a genie in a bottle in your back pocket you’d be hard pressed to find a faster way to make your dreams come true. Sorry, there’s that hyperbole again. I just couldn’t help myself. And you’ll soon see why.
As Wired puts it:
“The tech industry pays programmers handsomely to tap the right keys in the right order, but earlier this month entrepreneur Sharif Shameem tested an alternative way to write code.
First he wrote a short description of a simple app to add items to a to-do list and check them off once completed. Then he submitted it to an artificial intelligence system called GPT-3 that has digested large swaths of the web, including coding tutorials. Seconds later, the system spat out functioning code. ‘I got chills down my spine’ says Shameem. ‘I was like, ‘Woah something is different.’’
GPT-3, created by research lab OpenAI, is provoking chills across Silicon Valley. The company launched the service in beta last month and has gradually widened access. In the past week, the service went viral among entrepreneurs and investors, who excitedly took to Twitter to share and discuss results from prodding GPT-3 to generate memes, poems, tweets, and guitar tabs.
The software’s viral moment is an experiment in what happens when new artificial intelligence research is packaged and placed in the hands of people who are tech-savvy but not AI experts. OpenAI’s system has been tested and feted in ways it didn’t expect. The results show the technology’s potential usefulness but also its limitations—and how it can lead people astray.
Shameem’s videos showing GPT-3 responding to prompts like ‘a button that looks like a watermelon‘ by coding a pink circle with a green border and the word watermelon went viral and prompted gloomy predictions about the employment prospects of programmers. Delian Asparouhov, an investor with Founders Fund, an early backer of Facebook and SpaceX cofounded by Peter Thiel, blogged that GPT-3 ‘provides 10,000 PhDs that are willing to converse with you.’ Asparouhov fed GPT-3 the start of a memo on a prospective health care investment. The system added discussion of regulatory hurdles and wrote, ‘I would be comfortable with that risk, because of the massive upside and massive costs [sic] savings to the system.’
Other experiments have explored more creative terrain. Denver entrepreneur Elliot Turner found that GPT-3 can rephrase rude comments into polite ones—or vice versa to insert insults. An independent researcher known as Gwern Branwen generated a trove of literary GPT-3 content, including pastiches of Harry Potter in the styles of Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a broken Harry is in want of a book—or so says GPT-3 before going on to reference the magical bookstore in Diagon Alley.”
GPT-3 can do so many amazing things that there’s even a shrine on Product Hunt dedicated to its greatness, where you can check out all of the ongoing demos.
Technology Review was effusive in its praise as well:
“GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, released last year, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward. The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.
[Arram] Sabeti linked to a blog post where he showed off short stories, songs, press releases, technical manuals, and more that he had used the AI to generate. GPT-3 can also produce pastiches of particular writers. Mario Klingemann, an artist who works with machine learning, shared a short story called ‘The importance of being on Twitter,’ written in the style of Jerome K. Jerome, which starts: ‘It is a curious fact that the last remaining form of social life in which the people of London are still interested is Twitter. I was struck with this curious fact when I went on one of my periodical holidays to the sea-side, and found the whole place twittering like a starling-cage.’ Klingemann says all he gave the AI was the title, the author’s name and the initial ‘It.’ There is even a reasonably informative article about GPT-3 written entirely by GPT-3.”
As amazing as this is it certainly does raise some ethical concerns as well. We already have deep fakes videos and audio to contend with. Are we going to get to the point where we can’t tell what written words are real or fake as well? And forget about plagiarizing someone’s actual work; could we get to the point where we could plagiarize someone’s entire writing style?
But that’s a story for another day. (Pun intended). For now let’s just focus on GPT-3’s greatness and wonder what else it could be used for. Or more precisely, what else is it that we need to be worried about?!
Well, according to ZD Net:
“The reason that such a breakthrough could be useful to companies is that it has great potential for automating tasks. GPT-3 can respond to any text that a person types into the computer with a new piece of text that is appropriate to the context. Type a full English sentence into a search box, for example, and you’re more likely to get back some response in full sentences that is relevant. That means GPT-3 can conceivably amplify human effort in a wide variety of situations, from questions and answers for customer service to due diligence document search to report generation.”
So many of our jobs were already getting automated, replaced by AI and robotics. If the ones that were left over, so called knowledge worker jobs get eaten by GPT-3 what does that mean for society?! How will we survive?! Will we survive?!
I’m not sure. Perhaps we should ask GPT-3 for the answer.
Leave a comment