What Is GPT-3? OpenAI’s Ambitious Text Generator Backed By Elon Musk Is 'Eerily' Lifelike

OpenAI’s new text generation program, GPT-3, is causing a stir in the tech community over its ability to create sizeable chunks of human-like text. The software was reportedly taught to mimic real writing by processing “vast quantities” of writing from the Internet, according to a report from CNBC.

Backed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research firm dedicated to the creation of “friendly AI” programs. Their previous creations include the Debate Game, which taught machines how to argue problems before a judge, and Gym, an attempt to create standardized benchmarks for AI research.

GPT-3 is the third generation of the company’s “Generative Pre-training” software. The company claims that it is 100 times bigger than GPT-2, with roughly 1.75 billion parameters. It recently began distributing early versions of the program to those who had requested one, and the reactions so far have been overwhelmingly positive.

“It’s far more coherent than any AI language system I’ve ever tried,” Arram Sabeti, entrepreneur and founder of ZeroCrater, wrote in a blog post titled, “GPT-3: An AI that’s eerily good at writing almost anything.”

“All you have to do is write a prompt and it’ll add text it thinks would plausibly follow. I’ve gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. It’s hilarious and frightening. I feel like I’ve seen the future.”

Sabeti has posted the results of numerous and varied writing prompts given to GPT-3, including “Jerry Seinfeld and Eddie Murphy Talk Shit About San Francisco” and “Elon Musk By Dr. Seuss.”

“I was in San Francisco last week, and it looks like a homeless encampment,” the software wrote in imitation of Seinfeld. “It looks like the last days of Rome. People shitting in the street, stabbing each other. I don’t know what’s going on out there.”

OpenAI plans to roll out a commercial version of GPT-3 later in 2020. No price has been set for the product. Early versions are being distributed now so that developers and businesspeople can test out the program and potentially discover its use cases for prospective buyers.