Pre-reqs to things keep showing up, though.

It's not the thing.

But it's a pre-req to it.

This flitted across my timeline today: A self-driving motorcycle.

BMW has designed a self-driving motorcycle pic.twitter.com/WScuNQ9GzO

— Mashable (@mashable) July 31, 2020

If GPT-3 only achieves the level of learning to code that we could reasonably expect from a laid-off factory worker, then...

Wait.

I forgot where I was going with that.

GPT-3 is CAD software.

But for, like, different things.

I don't think it's aye-eye yet either.

But I'm noticing that we don't know how we work.

And that the Turing Test wasn't about the computer but about how easily humans see patterns.

And back to not knowing how we, ourselves, work again.

A good point. I've submitted my request to be added to the waitlist to play with this thing and my number has not yet come up.

But assuming that the people who are showing these things are not fabricating stories, we're talking about a technology capable of creating successes of this magnitude (assuming a level of competence that only people like Paras and Sharif happen to have).

GPT-2 was first announced in February 2019.
This is GPT-3. It's not even August.

Here's another fine, fine example of one of the successes.

Perhaps it's not representative.

I worked for a startup called Powerset in 2007 that tried to build something like this. We spent $100M and it was bought by MSFT to become Bing in 2008.

A single engineer can now build something that is literally an order of magnitude better in less than an hour with GPT-3. https://t.co/KdFnaVSFuv

— Siqi Chen (@blader) July 19, 2020

I'm talking about stuff like this:

This is mind blowing.

With GPT-3, I built a layout generator where you just describe any layout you want, and it generates the JSX code for you.

W H A T pic.twitter.com/w8JkrZO4lk

— Sharif Shameem (@sharifshameem) July 13, 2020

I mean, when I got my first "real" job in IT (that wasn't just data entry), there was a team of four guys who walked around the building. They were the Webmaster Team. They were the Webmasters.

We're probably talking more than half-a-mil in take-home salary walking around (and these were *CLINTON* dollars).

They did a lot of B.S.ing with the data backup team, the account management team, the print spool team, and the 3rd Tier sysadmin core support team (they ignored the 2nd Tier sysadmin support team for the most part).

All of the people on all of these teams together probably made up more than 80 people.

Now, I understand, the teams are consolidated and culled and it's fewer than a dozen people. Most of the jobs that were done by teams in the late 90's are done by scripts now. (And I don't want to say that this is a new development, indeed, the jobs were done by scripts by the mid-oughts.)

I'm sure that your job will be fine. I'm sure that you'd be one of the dozen kept around.

But the 80 people turned into a dozen people in less than a decade.

We're going to see something like that happen again.

This ain't GPT-3, but GPT-2. But this is a bot that has been trained to make religious statements.

If you wish to know the real nature of the creator, begin by knowing your own nature. Do not ask how a creator may appear to be whatever you wish it to be. Ask how a creator may appear to be anything at all. pic.twitter.com/SdYBduRtPN

— GPT-2 Religion Bot (@gods_txt) July 30, 2020

Just check it out and scroll down for a while.

It's weird and creepy.

See also: Smart Humans.

Check out this thread:

I was talking with my mom last night and explaining to her how crazy GPT-3 is, and I don’t think any of us are ready for the impact of this on society OR how quickly it’s going to happen

Smart phones became ubiquitous over maybe a 5(?) year period

Those require consumer spend

— Liminal Warmth 💕 (@liminal_warmth) July 30, 2020

I am not scared. Not really.

But I think that that's because I'm dumb and that if I were smart I would be scared.

Have you been watching people play with GP-3?

We're on the cusp of something *HUGE*.