AI Can Almost Write Like a Human--and More Advances Are Coming

Last month, software developer Kevin Lacker tested GPT-3, the latest version of an artificial-intelligence language system developed by San Francisco-based software company OpenAI LP. The system isn't yet public, but it set off a firestorm in tech circles after OpenAI gave select researchers and developers access so they could provide feedback. They observed its uncanny and unprecedented ability to answer trivia questions, generate long passages of coherent text, design simple software applications and offer plausible recipes for breakfast burritos. Trained on roughly 300 billion words from across the internet, GPT-3 predicts what is most likely to follow a prompt from a human. But ask it to reason, and it struggles.