Meet the AI that can write

A new general language machine learning model is pushing the boundaries of what AI can do. Why it matters: OpenAI's GPT-3 system can reasonably make sense of and write human language. It's still a long way from genuine artificial intelligence, but it may be looked back on as the iPhone of AI, opening the door to countless commercial applications -- both benign and potentially dangerous. Driving the news: After announcing GPT-3 in a paper in May, OpenAI recently began offering a select group of people access to the system's API to help the nonprofit explore the AI's full capabilities. How it works: GPT-3 works the same way as predecessors like OpenAI's GPT-2 and Google's BERT -- analyzing huge swathes of the written internet and using that information to predict which words tend to follow after each other.