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by simonkafan 2074 days ago
I still don't see or have read about a useful use case for GPT-3. Maybe for procedurally generated chitchat between NPC in video games or an advanced Lorem ipsum generator but that's about it.
4 comments

Yes. People were literally claiming to be able to write code using English language descriptions. This guy on Twitter generated a ton of hype with these cherry picked examples...even from people who should know better like Eliezer Yudkowsky.

https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1284095222939451393...

Also interesting to note that the hype came a while after the release of GPT-3 (the tweet was about a month after), and that many of the examples could have possibly been generated from GPT-2 (which didn't get as much hype). Put another way, you could show ppl GPT-2 examples from a year ago and claim they were from GPT-3, and I don't think many would know the difference.

I do think GPT-3 has shown improvement, and it's a step forward, but it probably tells more about how humans interpret rather than how AI might work. Wrote about it more in the link below:

https://avoidboringpeople.substack.com/p/doctor-gpt-3

GPT-3 says: "Well, it's not intended for that. It's more for meaningful conversations like you have with people in real life. Look, use cases are not my area of expertise, you'll have to talk to the project lead about that."

GPT-3's use case is fun.

Auto-formatting punctuation - or syntax. You can show it a few examples and it will insert punctuation into raw words coming in from speech recognition, or convert badly formatted Python into well-formatted Python. It can correct syntax errors in C++ (!).

More generally, it can convert text from a simple, unstructured form into more complex, more structured form, with just a few example transforms. It's astonishingly good at it, but I haven't seen much on the public net about it. I don't know why people aren't exploring it more tbh.

Now that it is a captive technology, the question becomes why should anyone want to explore it other than Microsoft.
It's not captive. It's quite replicable (and impossible to monopolise), it's just expensive.
I’m the founder of copy.ai, a GPT-3 app that generates short form marketing copy. We have paying users already who find it helpful.
A scathing critique of both GPT-3 and marketing copy
This is unjustly harsh. At least it's got tangible benefits and customers without harming a soul. GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

I'm hoping we can finish some of Tolkien's unpublished books (Please give me beta access OpenAI heh)

> This is unjustly harsh. At least it's got tangible benefits and customers without harming a soul. GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

> I'm hoping we can finish some of Tolkien's unpublished books (Please give me beta access OpenAI heh)

> [...] GPT-3 can be and is likely already weaponised, it's nice to see anyone out there using it for humble things rather than straight-up digital warfare.

Well, not that I necessarily agree with the decision (I'm undecided), but one point in favor of only giving access to the model via an API rather than releasing it, is that the use can be monitored and hopefully "weaponization" will be either noticed or detected[0].

It would be pretty interesting if OpenAI eventually provided an external "ML API abuse monitoring" service, but one problem I haven't figured out a solution to is that when providing such a service, the goals of "reducing harmful use" and of "slowing the arms race"[1] (which are both valid goals) are somewhat opposed. I'm still thinking about that.[2]

[0] Using ML to detect harmful uses of an ML API would be a quite interesting research topic, and quite in line with OpenAI's stated mission, but gathering the necessary data set for training purposes may require allowing harmful use of the API in the first place (though I have thought of a few ways to mitigate those risks and limit the actual harm).

[1] http://xkcd.com/810/ is amusing, but misses the point. Spammers aren't just attempting to evade filters, but also trying to accomplish their goal, so inadvertently training a bot capable of writing an apparently constructive comment that successfully sneaks a spam link through to be clicked on and/or indexed isn't exactly a win for the good guys.

[2] I wouldn't be surprised in the least if a GAN-like social deception arms-race (especially since the same networks have to serve as both generator and discriminator) was the proximate cause of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

Oof, such an awesome technology whose use is going for something like marketing copy. I'm sure it pays the bills for you, but is kind of gross overall.
It's the AT-5000 auto-dialer all over again.
In the future, the AI will persuade who to vote for in coming elections.
Yes, if only they put their efforts towards generating low effort, self-righteous posts on message boards.

Marketing isn't evil, and it isn't the end of the world.

Of course marketing isn't evil, and I didn't say that. Marketing can be quite awesome and impressively done. However, you know AI/GPT-3-based writing and helping of marketing copy will lead to lowest common denominator scaling of marketing copy to everyone with tweaks for the specifically targeted person. My opinion is that that's as gross as ML people at Google optimizing for every ad click with slight tweaks to maximize revenue at any cost. Gross.

As to your dig, my conscience is clear; I made a conscious effort to avoid such ends in my professional life, sometimes to my short term detriment. My personal time is mine to do with what I please, even if you consider some of that time to be used in a self righteous or low effort way. It's not self righteous to point out bad things.