Recently, OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough, GPT-2, a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works… sufficiently successfully that OpenAI has said that it’s too dangerous to release the code (lest it result in “deepfake news” or other misleading mischief).
Scott Alexander contemplates the results. His conclusion:
a brain running at 5% capacity is about as good as the best AI that the brightest geniuses working in the best-equipped laboratories in the greatest country in the world are able to produce in 2019. But:We believe this project is the first step in the direction of developing large NLP systems without task-specific training data. That is, we are developing a machine language system in the generative style with no explicit rules for producing text. We hope for future collaborations between computer scientists, linguists, and machine learning researchers.
A boring sentiment from an interesting source: the AI wrote that when asked to describe itself. We live in interesting times.
His complete post, eminently worthy of reading in full: “Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?”
[image above, and another account of OpenAI’s creation: “OpenAI says its new robo-writer is too dangerous for public release“]
* Eliezer Yudkowsky
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As we take the Turing Test, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to Steve Jobs; he was born on this date in 1955. While he is surely well-known to every reader here, let us note for the record that he was was instrumental in developing the Macintosh, the computer that took Apple to unprecedented levels of success. After leaving the company he started with Steve Wozniak, Jobs continued his personal computer development at his NeXT Inc. In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple to lead the company into a new era based on NeXT technologies and consumer electronics. Some of Jobs’ achievements in this new era include the iMac, the iPhone, the iTunes music store, the iPod, and the iPad. Under Jobs’ leadership Apple was at one time the world’s most valuable company. (And, of course, he bought Pixar from George Lucas, and oversaw both its rise to animation dominance and its sale to Disney– as a product of which Jobs became Disney’s largest single shareholder.)
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