GPT-3, explained: This new language AI is uncanny, funny -- and a big deal

Last month, OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence research lab, announced the arrival of the newest version of an AI system it had been working on that can mimic human language, a model called GPT-3. In the weeks that followed, people got the chance to play with the program. If you follow news about AI, you may have seen some headlines calling it a huge step forward, even a scary one. I've now spent the past few days looking at GPT-3 in greater depth and playing around with it. I'm here to tell you: The hype is real. It has its shortcomings, but make no mistake: GPT-3 represents a tremendous leap for AI. A year ago I sat down to play with GPT-3's precursor dubbed (you guessed it) GPT-2.