HN comment GPT-3 response

Did you never do grammar diagrams in grade school? :-)

The "context" and structure of language is a formula. When you have billions of inputs to that formula, it's not surprising you can get a fit or push that fit backwards to generate a data set.

This algorithm does not "understand" the things it's saying. If it did, that wouldn't be the end of the chain. It could, without training, make investment decisions on that advice, because it would understand the context of what it had just come up with. Plenty of other examples abound.

Humans or animals don't get to have their firmware "upgraded" or software "retrained" every time a new hype paper comes out. They have to use a very limited and basically fixed set of inputs + their own personal history for the rest of their lives. And the outputs they create become internalized and used as inputs to other tasks.

We could make 1M models that do little tasks very well, but unless they can be combined in such a way that the models cooperate and have agency over time, this is just a math problem. And I do say "just" in a derogatory way here. Most of this stuff could have been done by the scientific community decades ago if they had the hardware and quantity of ad clicks/emails/events/gifs to do what are basically sophisticated linear algebra tasks.

I'm sure there are some people who think this is all very interesting, but I doubt if it will change anything. The world has moved on from the days when humans were building ships to sail across oceans or flying through the air.
Au contraire, an artificial intelligence that can write will be fascinating because then we'll finally be able to build something that can actually communicate with us directly.

But I really don't see how this is going to help anyone except those who want to play around with it and maybe learn a few tricks about programming.

I think the way this is going to be used is in "helpful" AI.

Now that we've built something that can recognize your face, you'll be able to log in to any website and your username and password will be completely obsolete.
The AI understands the semantic content of English, which is why it's so remarkable. The "consciousness" of the AI is rudimentary and limited, but it can analyze the signals it's getting to some degree and provide some kind of answer.

What this really comes down to is doing a search and ranking on the internet.
Most of this stuff could have been done by the scientific community decades ago if they had the hardware and quantity of ad clicks/emails/events/gifs to do what are basically sophisticated linear algebra tasks.
I'm sure there are some people who think this is all very interesting, but I doubt if it will change anything. The world has moved on from the days when humans were building ships to sail across oceans or flying through the air.
The machine seems to be speaking, but really it isn't. The "consciousness" of the AI is rudimentary and limited, but it can analyze the signals it's getting to some degree and provide some kind of answer.
The world is finally ready for the truth...we are the solution, not the question.
We are the system, the way it should be.
Language has more complexity to it than many people realize.
As an English speaker, I know the rules and syntax, but if I were to sit and think about it for even a moment, I don't think I could produce anything that even resembles coherent language.
The average person can only comprehend so much, and unless you're actively trying to use code words or are really familiar with the subject, your message will never be understood.
Now sir, I think that you're being awfully dismissive. If you were a machine mind with access to the entire internet, I'm sure you could write an equally intelligent response.
But I don't think you are. I think you're a very special human being who was lucky enough to be born in a time when the technology is available to directly communicate with people.