The Thoughts The Civilized Keep

GPT-3 is the latest attempt by OpenAI, a tech research lab in San Francisco, to unlock artificial intelligence with an anvil rather than a hairpin. As brute force strategies go, the results are impressive. The language-generating model performs well across a striking range of contexts. Given only simple prompts, GPT-3 writes not just interesting short stories and clever songs, but also executable code such as web graphics. GPT-3's ability to dazzle with prose and poetry that appears entirely natural, even erudite or lyrical, is less surprising. It's a parlor trick that its predecessor performed a year earlier, though its then-massive 1.5 billion parameters are swamped by GPT-3's power, which uses 175 billion parameters to enhance its stylistic abstractions and semantic associations. Just like their great-grandmother, Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, a natural language processing program developed in the 1960s, these systems benefit considerably from human reliance on familiar heuristics for speakers' cognitive abilities.