OpenAI language model has shattered my fundamental belief system

I have been following OpenAI for a long time, so when they announced a public beta of their latest language model, GPT-3, I was one of the first to request and get access to the API.

I have always believed that programming, writing software, or developing ML models are skills that take years and years of practice and cannot be easily automated. But boy, was I wrong.

GPT-3 has shattered some of my most fundamental beliefs around machine learning and software in general: absolutely mind-blowing stuff.

I haven’t experienced anything like this before. In a matter of a couple of hours, I was able to read through the API documentation and build a chatbot that may be better than most enterprises will ever have, write a poem, summarize a consumer terms and conditions statement into simple English that anyone can understand, have a lot of stupid fun, and still have time left to write this post.

Still figuring out the art of priming, so I don’t have good examples to post yet. I will do a detailed post soon. The API in general has a lot of quirks, especially with India-specific context, which may take a couple of iterations to be ready for prime time. But let me explain what may happen when this takes off.

AWS is to infrastructure, GPT-3 is to ML.

Let’s understand with a narrow example first.

Business users used to rely heavily on specialist data analysts to derive even basic metrics and trends from their data until Tableau came along with a pioneering product that reduced friction between users and data.

A slightly broader example is how AWS removed friction between infrastructure and developers and dramatically reduced the timeline to start something new from months to minutes. It took months for me to set up and run my first analytics pipeline on Hadoop.

GPT-3 is aiming to abstract away the complexity of machine learning, which is the training of models, through simple English-language instructions.

This would have far-reaching impact beyond any of the above examples. There are already examples of generating code for a web app through this API.

We are going to compete with AI for jobs.

I am not able to completely comprehend the impact of such models on the world, but I have changed my beliefs and accept that we are going to compete with AI for many current jobs.

Just to be clear, I am not talking about blue-collar jobs or jobs that can be easily automated, but jobs like data scientists and software engineers as well. It may take a decade, but I don’t question the possibility anymore.

I can’t wait to explore further and share my findings. Happy to try out any specific use case or answer questions.

#OpenAI #GPT3 #AI