Inferring the correlation between X and Y, or writing an article in a magazine. Between these two tasks, which one can only be done by a human, and which can be done by a machine? It would seem like the answer is fairly straightforward isn’t it? Inferring a correlation between two variables is math. Of course a human could do it. But that would be tedious and time consuming. It would be easier to just let the machine do that, because it can. But writing an article? That is an art. It takes creativity and imagination to write, surely only a human would be capable of doing something like that? Oh how far technology has come.
In May 2020 researchers unveiled the latest advancement in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Dubbing it Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). In technical terms GPT-3 is “an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters”. In kinder terms, it is a machine learning model that has been pre-trained using a large dataset to “learn” how to write like a human (autoregressive language model). And It has a lot of parameters that can be finely tuned by a user to speak in a very specific way (175 billion parameters). So once given a prompt, like a question, GPT-3 is able to return a response that would sound like it is coming from a human. It has become so proficient at this that authors, and multiple reviewers, have asserted that it is almost indistinguishable from a human response.
