The astonishingly good but predictably bad AI program

When the chief executive of a San Francisco artificial intelligence company tries to damp down the hype surrounding his own technology then you know that some people have become rather excitable. But that is exactly what Sam Altman attempted to do last month in response to the ecstatic reaction to OpenAI's latest GPT-3 program. "The GPT-3 hype is way too much," Mr Altman tweeted. "It's impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes." GPT-3, which stands for generative pre-trained transformer version three, is, in essence, a super-sophisticated auto-complete function, which sounds less than exciting.