General-Purpose Question-Answering with Macaw

While OpenAI's GPT-3 system has proved to be remarkably effective at many tasks, including question-answering (QA), it is still out of reach for many organizations, being only available to approved users for a fee. While there are a few other pretrained QA systems available, none has quite matched GPT-3's few-shot QA performance -- until now. AI2 has just released Macaw (multi-angle question-answering), a versatile, generative question-answering (QA) system that exhibits strong zero-shot performance on a wide range of question types. On a suite of 300 challenge questions, Macaw outperformed GPT-3 by over 10%, even though Macaw is an order of magnitude smaller (11 billion vs. 175 billion parameters). Even better, Macaw is publicly available for free.