3 ms·

Have you read any business books? I used to read quite a few. For the most part, they take a central thesis and then repeat variations on the theme over and ove

Have you read any business books? I used to read quite a few. For the most part, they take a central thesis and then repeat variations on the theme over and over again. Sometimes with anecdotes of questionable veracity. I venture that many of them could be generated with GPT-3. My point is, GPT-3 is operating at human levels for certain contexts. I think it would get passing grades on essays in a lot of schools in the US, for instance, just based on syntax and grammar.

gfodor 6y ago
This stuff is so new that HN threads may be the first to mention realistic potential applications - congratulations, I think you just found one. Having GPT-3 render a first draft of books in the archetype you mention (one simple idea stretched out over many pages) seems like a very profitable endeavor.
- abernard1 6y ago
  > Having GPT-3 render a first draft of books in the archetype you mention (one simple idea stretched out over many pages). Given what I've seen so far with GPT-3, that simple idea would have to have already been discussed at length on forums on the internet and in the corpus. Usually books have facts and studies that they use as supporting points. Many of the connections they make between the subject material and their thesis are unique, and this forms their supporting argument. GPT-3 is rearranging words and sentences to resemble structures it's seen before, but it does not create novel facts.
  - visarga 6y ago
    So ideally it could work like a meta-study. Meta-studies combine results from multiple separate studies, making correlations and drawing more confident conclusions. Most 'original' human ideas are just reinventions of older ideas, too. The interesting part is that GPT-3's leap in performance can be attributed to scaling. That's easier to do than inventing completely new approaches. Scale data, scale compute, scale money, then you have something you couldn't have invented directly.

gfodor 6y ago

This stuff is so new that HN threads may be the first to mention realistic potential applications - congratulations, I think you just found one. Having GPT-3 render a first draft of books in the archetype you mention (one simple idea stretched out over many pages) seems like a very profitable endeavor.

abernard1 6y ago
> Having GPT-3 render a first draft of books in the archetype you mention (one simple idea stretched out over many pages). Given what I've seen so far with GPT-3, that simple idea would have to have already been discussed at length on forums on the internet and in the corpus. Usually books have facts and studies that they use as supporting points. Many of the connections they make between the subject material and their thesis are unique, and this forms their supporting argument. GPT-3 is rearranging words and sentences to resemble structures it's seen before, but it does not create novel facts.
- visarga 6y ago
  So ideally it could work like a meta-study. Meta-studies combine results from multiple separate studies, making correlations and drawing more confident conclusions. Most 'original' human ideas are just reinventions of older ideas, too. The interesting part is that GPT-3's leap in performance can be attributed to scaling. That's easier to do than inventing completely new approaches. Scale data, scale compute, scale money, then you have something you couldn't have invented directly.