For many GPT1-3 is the first exposure to language modelling technology, which is great, but language modelling and pretraining is already widely used in nearly every NLP task even before GPT1. Any NLP engineer has used this, so it is kind of weird to claim large-scale pretrained LMs are revolutionised with GPT3.

Don't get me wrong the hype is largely deserved because of the performance and engineering/research/funding effort required. Plus cool demos and media marketing from OpenAI helps a lot in spreading awareness.

OpenAI has definitely revolutionised the marketing for language models, no doubt. Let's wait and see if they manage to do the same for the economic valorisation.

really? I am very impressed by GPT-3 but I still don't see any way to make money "obviously" out of it.

Maybe it can be an adjuvant to human in some tasks but then so could existing technologies too, I guess?

Do you want a computer that can reliably understand you and give you the best possible answer 99% of the time?

I think most people would go: yes! How much does it cost?

Oh, I thought we were talking about GPT-3

If you're running a search engine maybe.

But everyday people are used to getting 80% answers by search engines, I don't think many would pay for something that is "like google, but a bit better".

This seems the be current issue for many things that we used to pay for (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, newspapers, etc), and I'm not sure this would be different.

> "like google, but a bit better"

For simple queries like “who was the president of country X in YYYY” it’s probably just a bit better (if cached, of course, Google search is wicked fast).

But for more complex queries, Google is still remarkably dumb. Or downright insolent, ignoring my verbatim selection or quoted terms.

I’d pay good money for scarily smart search and a “grep for the web” service, that included JSON, CSS, JavaScript, comments, whatever. A toggle button for dumb/smart search

I would easily pay money for something that is like Google, but a bit better.

I wont

google's majority revenue is from search. So bit better than google, particularly if it is integrated into bing (as microsoft has invested in openAI) , and allows bing to capture market share from google, would be really lucrative

On the other hand, do you want a computer that gives you less accurate answers than more specialised tools but can spin them into something that looks like an essay? is less obviously monetisable than, say, already commercially available services like Alexa which incorporate NLP but don't rely exclusively on it.

GPT-3 is not capable of what you are describing.

I think regular folks are already pretty clued into how other things like text mining and sentiment determination have big markets considering how strong the backlash against tech politically is right now. The everyday public and by extension politicians seem reasonably capable of imagining how data can be monetized for ads, and they dont seem too happy about it.

Really? I have the opposite, not as positive impression. I hope you are right though.

I think it depends on how you define "clued in". They are aware of its existence but aren't just ignorant of how it works but outright apathetic and hostile to anything which goes against their personal narrative.

Just look at the "Google selling your data" being uncritically accepted when five minutes of thought would conclude it is the last thing Google would want (even a better search algorithim would find it hard to bootstrap on user base and comparable training time) or the casual John Yoo worthy torture of the definition of monopoly to include Goddamned Netflix when whining about FAANG monopolies. That level of generalization and stereotyping is like blaming the Amish for flying planes into the World Trade center because both are radical Sbraham religions.