[rsynnott]

I do wonder what the state of Google's stuff in 2021 was. Here's something produced by the 2020 version of GPT-3: https://www.aiweirdness.com/roses-are-red/

At that point, OpenAI was still fairly clearly at the babbling obvious nonsense phase; I would wonder was Google's stuff much better.

I also wonder if the original authors would have been surprised to learn that, by 2023, lawyers would be citing fake precedent made up by a machine. The progression to "dangerous nonsense" really does seem to have been worryingly fast.

[dekhn]

I was really impressed with the work that Noam Shazeer was doing at Google before he left (I worked on TPUs and frequently had to debug problems at scale for researchers). It was clear he was making some pretty impressive improvements, but the results weren't super obvious even to most people inside google, and they didn't translate to externally visible projects.

This isn't that dissimilar to working at any sufficiently advanced R&D outfit, which strongly demonstrates the principle "the future is already here but isn't evenly distributed".