Foundation models may be the future of AI. They're also deeply flawed

For a while, it seemed like the future. When it was first unveiled in May 2020, OpenAI's GPT-3 language model stunned observers with its capacity to generate human-like text from prompts of just a few words. Suddenly, the demise of the professional writer – and any chance of curbing fake news – seemed nigh. GPT-3 was simultaneously praised as one of the most powerful AI tools ever developed and deemed too dangerous to be released as an open-source model. Over subsequent months, however, significant flaws in GPT-3 began to emerge.