GPT-3 OpenAI
So, GPT-3. The new hotshot of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It has been called “one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced” by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher.
But… what actually is it?
If you’ve seen any articles on it, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzzwords. Maybe some technical terminology – a ‘third-generation language prediction model’ with “175 billion machine learning parameters.” That might make sense to you – but if it doesn’t, fear not, Tetrabyte are here to break down the basics.
Essentially, it’s a text generator, made by OpenAI as the latest in its GPT series. It works by analysing a vast amount of text from all over the internet, scans of books, and even Wikipedia. It studies patterns, context clues and billions of other parameters (over ten times more than the second most powerful text generation system) to replicate human-written text.
But what can it actually do? Well, users can input a prompt – both written text and context clues, including titles, author’s names, introductions etc – and it’ll feed back incredibly realistic-seeming text. This can include essays, fiction and commentary, but also business ideas and song lyrics. It can even code in Python, CSS and JSX.
It’s so advanced, though, that it’s often impossible to tell text it generates apart from text written by a human. This, of course, has a load of potential risks – from the relatively harmless (being used to generate fake essays and assignments) to the really dangerous (spam emails, abuse of political systems and more).
For an example, The Guardian even posted an entire article online written by GPT-3 itself. They fed it different prompts and it created eight distinct, unique essays, which were then edited together into a single overall piece. If you didn’t know, do you think you could tell it wasn’t human?
It’s not all doom and gloom, though! GPT-3 is an amazing piece of tech, and it’s doing incredible things. Inspiring new research into AI, machine learning, linguistics, it’s inspiring writers and entrepreneurs, allowing new, coding-free plugins for website design, and so much more. It’s even branching out into entertainment and culture!
In fact, there’s a whole host of GPT-powered tools you can have a go with right now – including:
- AI Writer, which allows you to ask questions of a whole bunch of different historical and fictional figures. The AI examines their writing and what we know about them, and aims to answer in their voice. You can ask Mary Shelley about Frankenstein, Benjamin Franklin about social media, or the Hulk about… well, why Hulk smash?
- AI Dungeon, which simulates a classic text-based RPG like Zork, using different generations of the GPT AIs to respond to player input and tell stories. You can also create and share scenarios, playing out whatever game you’d like in whatever world you want.
So, all in all – so long as it’s being handled carefully, we should be pretty excited about what this thing can do.
Although who knows? Maybe GPT-3’s writing this blog post itself?
You can never be sure…
