Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt.
The architecture is a standard transformer network (with a few engineering tweaks) with the unprecedented size of 2048-token-long context and 175 billion parameters (requiring 800 GB of storage). The training method is “generative pretraining”, meaning that it is trained to predict what the next token is. The model demonstrated strong few-shot learning on many text-based tasks.
It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series (and the successor to GPT-2) created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory. GPT-3, which was introduced in May 2020, and was in beta testing as of July 2020, is part of a trend in natural language processing (NLP) systems of pre-trained language representations.
The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human, which has both benefits and risks. Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original May 28, 2020 paper introducing GPT-3. In their paper, they warned of GPT-3’s potential dangers and called for research to mitigate risk.David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, described GPT-3 as “one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced.” An April 2022 review in The New York Times described GPT-3’s capabilities as being able to write original prose with fluency equivalent to that of a human.
Microsoft announced on September 22, 2020 that it had licensed “exclusive” use of GPT-3; others can still use the public API to receive output, but only Microsoft has access to GPT-3’s underlying model.