In 1829, an event took place that unleashed a technological revolution. At the Rainhill Trials a group of steam locomotives squared off to determine which one could win a series of tests of speed, strength and reliability. The winning machine, Rocket, not only blew away its competition at the trials, it also set the direction for steam locomotive development for the following century.

What does all this have to do with GPT-3, the transformer language model that OpenAI made available in a limited beta starting in June? Some reviewers have heralded GPT-3 as the first glimpse of artificial general intelligence, while others are calling it a massive lookup table. I don’t think GPT-3 is AGI, but I do think the approach used in GPT-3 will be transformative. Using massive computing power and a huge training suite, OpenAI has created a model that is genuinely general-purpose. By drawing comparisons to the dawn of the railway age we can put GPT-3 in context and see its impact more clearly.

#railways #ai #chatbots #gpt-3 #rasa