Social media is awash with people talking about a new piece of software called GPT-3, which has been developed by OpenAI, an Elon Musk-backed artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-training) is a language-generation tool capable of producing human-like text on demand. The software learned how to produce text by analyzing vast quantities on the internet and observing which letters and words tend to follow one another. OpenAI started releasing it to a select few people last week who had requested access to a private early version, and many of them have been blown away. "It's far more coherent than any AI language system I've ever tried," wrote entrepreneur Arram Sabeti in a blog post after testing. "All you have to do is write a prompt and it'll add text it thinks would plausibly follow.