Ask HN: Let's talk gpt-3 hype. overblown or justified?

[hejja]

I've counted between 3-5 GPT posts on the front page all today and yesterday

Not to mention 74% of my twitter feed.

Don't get me wrong, I was at peak hype. Top 10% of gpt-3 hypebeasts.

But now I'm thinking: "it's good, but what are the practical use cases that is effectively a babbling machine"

In other words if it's 95% believable, with the amount of nuance required for high skilled use cases or jobs, well, that's still not enough.

Your thoughts?

[forgotmypw17]

In terms of human development, publicly available and disclosed machine intelligence has reached what in human child development would be considered a major new milestone.

Previously, Eliza and the likes could only mimic basic speech construction, with increasing levels of correctness.

Now, GPT-3 can mimic meaning and understading, rather convincingly. Its mistakes are akin to a child's naive questions.

I would put its equivalent human age at about 3-5 years old. Sometimes 5-year-olds can come up with nonsense, and sometimes you have an "out of the mouths of babes" moment.

That's really huge, IMO.