The technology behind OpenAI's fiction-writing, fake-news-spewing AI, explained

So convincing, in fact, that the researchers have refrained from open-sourcing the code, in hopes of stalling its potential weaponization as a means of mass-producing fake news. An OpenAI employee printed out this AI-written sample and posted it by the recycling bin: https://t.co/PT8CMSU2AR While the impressive results are a remarkable leap beyond what existing language models have achieved, the technique involved isn't exactly new. Instead, the breakthrough was driven primarily by feeding the algorithm ever more training data--a trick that has also been responsible for most of the other recent advancements in teaching AI to read and write. "It's kind of surprising people in terms of what you can do with [...] more data and bigger models," says Percy Liang, a computer science professor at Stanford.