This algorithm speaks just like us. I had a rare opportunity to meet it

It goes by many names, this thing that we yearn for and that rules us: opium, money, power. William S. Burroughs, the American cult author, likened them all – in his 1959 novel "Naked Lunch" – to the flesh of a gargantuan centipede that lurks in the depths and has an irresistible taste, and whose addicts gorge on it until they lose consciousness. To get a piece of it one must undergo endless ordeals, wandering about in kitchens, sleeping cubicles, wobbly balconies and basements. That's also the sort of route one must follow in order to experience the products of an algorithm that was unveiled in May in Silicon Valley. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, aka GPT-3, is a "language model": a machine learning system that's capable of automatically and dynamically generating texts in human-like language. Since its emergence, thousands have wished to touch it, use it, breathe in something of the words it spews out. But only a few have been vouchsafed that privilege.