OpenAI's gigantic GPT-3 hints at the limits of language models for AI

A little over a year ago, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, stunned the world by showing a dramatic leap in what appeared to be the power of computers to form natural-language sentences, and even to solve questions, such as completing a sentence, and formulating long passages of text people found fairly human. The latest work from that team shows how OpenAI's thinking has matured in some respects. GPT-3, as the newest creation is called, emerged last week, with more bells and whistles, created by some of the same authors as the last version, including Alec Radford and Ilya Sutskever, along with several additional collaborators, including scientists from Johns Hopkins University. It is now a truly monster language model, as it's called, gobbling two orders of magnitude more text than its predecessor. But within that bigger-is-better stunt, the OpenAI team seem to be approaching some deeper truths, much the way Dr. David Bowman approached the limits of the known at the end of the movie 2001.