Artificial intelligence is mastery of language. Should we trust what he says?

But as the fluency of GPT-3 has impressed many observers, the big language model approach has also attracted significant criticism over the past few years. Some skeptics argue that the software is only capable of blind imitation – that it imitates the grammatical patterns of human language but is unable to generate its own ideas or make complex decisions, a fundamental limitation that would prevent the LLM approach from maturing into anything resembling human intelligence. For these critics, GPT-3 is the latest brilliant object in a long history of AI hype, directing research money and attention to what will ultimately prove to be a dead end, preventing other promising approaches from maturing. Other critics believe programs like GPT-3 will forever be compromised by biases, propaganda, and misinformation in the data they have been trained on, meaning their use of anything more than salon tricks will always be irresponsible. Wherever you get to this debate, the pace of recent improvement in large language models makes it hard to imagine that they will not be deployed commercially in the coming years.