Ask HN: What are the Implications of GPT-3?

10 points by jaydd ↗ HN
From what I've been hearing, it's a game changer.

9 comments

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Preface: I'd wait a few months before declaring it a game changer. There currently is a huge OpenAI marketing campaign going on touting how amazing GPT-3 is. Almost all the GPT-3 press comes from OpenAI's friends and network of YC founders who got privileged access and promised to build apps on top of the new API. You can see that by looking at the most popular tweets and posts. It's usually ex-YC people who are now working on new GPT-3 powered apps. Their examples and demos are clearly cherry picked. It's the typical Silicon Valley VC pitch deck smoke demo approach that you would expect from SV startup people. Let the hype and marketing campaign settle down.

That being said, if it all works as promised and the model becomes widely available it's quite amazing and has the potential to change a few things. The obvious one is that it becomes much easier to automatically create plausible-looking content such as news stories, comments, etc. This will create many more bots and spam than you are used to seeing. The other obvious one is to act as a natural-language based search engine or database, where you can ask questions and get facts as answers. This would be restricted to non-subjective things that are in the training data of course.

On a longer time scale, it could drive the adoption of technologies around fact and identify verification. As it becomes so much easier to automatically generate content, we need to better ways to establish trust. Safety and bias is yet another, since anything generated will obviously be biased to whatever is most common in the training data.

You know, this week I've been fascinated by a GPT-3 implementation writing HTML/React code, but, as you said, that is coming from a YC Alumni, so there might be actually some truth about the OpenAI press "conspiracy" theory.

Granted I was/am still sceptical, but also very curious, about the actual performance and quality of that code generator thingy and I hope he actually opens the tool this weekend this time around, as he didn't open it up at the previous announced date.

Oh, am talking about https://twitter.com/sharifshameem btw.

I've seen multiple profiles just like that one tweeting amazing things about GPT-3. I didn't keep track, but [0] and [1] just turned up doing a quick Twitter search. There are a lot more.

It's quite suspicious that instead of giving access to AI researchers who have the ability to evaluate the model and may be skeptical, OpenAI has largely been giving access to Silicon Valley startup people and VCs who know very little about AI but say how game-changing it is. Perhaps it's just their network with extra incentives. Gwern being the only exception that comes to mind.

[0] https://twitter.com/arram/status/1281258647566217216

[1] https://twitter.com/mckaywrigley/status/1284110063498522624

> They're probably being paid for it and their examples and demos are clearly cherry picked.

This is a hefty and ungrounded accusation. You get access to the API by sending an email with a use-case; this has been said independently by multiple people, eg. [1]. Gwern has also commented that you don't have to cherry pick nearly as much as you did for GPT-2; a decent fraction of samples are simply good.

One of the key points of OpenAI API is that they can vet users to prevent abuses like malicious bots and spam.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hs9zqo/p_g...

You're right that this is an ungrounded accusation and I changed my comment.

For what it's worth, I know several people at competing labs who applied for access and didn't hear back. If you are doing science, aren't other scientists, especially those who are critical, the first ones that should get access?

The process is cherry-picking by definition; you provide a use case and are then selected (or not selected) based on their perception of your merit.

They are a startup. They are looking for funding. By definition they will do whatever necessary to secure that funding.

I don't think you need a ProPublica research piece to prove the validity of that premise.