The GPT-3 Model: What Does It Mean for Chatbots and Customer Service?

In February 2019, the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI sent shockwaves through the world of computing by releasing the GPT-2 language model. Short for "Generative Pretrained Transformer 2," GPT-2 is able to generate several paragraphs of natural language text -- often impressively realistic and internally coherent -- based on a short prompt. Scarcely a year later, OpenAI has already outdone itself with GPT-3, a new generative language model that is bigger than GPT-2 by orders of magnitude. The largest version of the GPT-3 model has 175 billion parameters, more than 100 times the 1.5 billion parameters of GPT-2. Just like its predecessor GPT-2, GPT-3 was trained on a simple task: given the previous words in a text, predict the next word. This required the model to consume very large datasets of Internet text, such as Common Crawl and Wikipedia, totalling 499 billion tokens (i.e.