I was a skeptic of the performance too ("surely all these demos are cherrypicked") but having played with the beta for a dozen hours and gotten better at prompts, the performance is real, and it's good enough to build the mentioned products around that people are willing to pay money for.

Will these be good, airtight products at the same level as human-designed performance? No. But we're not talking about "self-driving car needs six 9's of reliability to meet regulations or face a PR nightmare" performance.

We're talking about "is this AI therapy bot fun to chat to and better than paying $200 per hour for a therapist?" performance.

We're talking about "is is cheaper to pay a writer $200 per news article or $0.05 for a good enough article?"

1. What if an AI therapy bot tells a depressed person to kill themselves? How do you get a language model to obey confidentiality rules? How do you prevent it from memorizing and regurgitating someone's mental health conversation to another patient?

2. I think the implications of replacing journalists with far cheaper automated systems (with substantially less fact-checking capability) have not been well thought out, and I worry that some VC bro is going to rush a product to market before policy makers / stakeholders have thought carefully about whether this is something that we want.

It's telling that GPT-3's best writing successes have been of the "philosophical musing" variety, not of writing accurate articles. I'm not sure whether that says more about AI or Philosophy.

Ideally all creators to be as thoughtful and careful as you. But we all know 1) there will be plenty of builders will build and launch regardless of how ready the app is, 2) users happily use whatever's engaging, convenient, and low-cost, while ignoring problems with privacy, security, and whether the product is net negative for a % of users (see TikTok, Twitter, Whisper).

If the technology is here, then the products will exist, and regulation isn't going to come in time to stop it.

The big difference here is that TikTok, Twitter, Whisper actually have working technology, in spite of ethical concerns. What I am saying is that the people who want to use GPT-3 for business use case X, Y, and Z probably have not thought deeply enough about the limitations/implications of large language model methodology on specific nuances of X, Y, Z tasks.

Have you considered the fact that GPT-3 can't actually look up any information? Consider the implications of that before suggesting that GPT-3 could be used for therapy.

How well this would work in practice is up for debate.

Did you follow product development in recent decades? The iPhone was not ready for prime time as well but still people bought it and where very happy.

A lot of products nowadays are kind of MVP's or betas and people are willing to accept their flaws and edges just to be an early adopter of technologies which remind them of beloved Sci-Fi movies.

> by construction, it also cannot store information provided by the user for later use, nor can it "look up" facts

Other tools can do that. You can connect them just like you do with micro services or modular systems - what is the issue about this?

The statement "starting a business ... is a bad idea" cannot be proven and there are also no examples to strengthen this position. So until one does you just cannot prove this statement so this is just speculation.

Clearly I'm missing something here. Can you walk me through how exactly a micro service would enable GPT-3 to look up facts, and incorporate that knowledge into a conversation? What would the microservice API look like? How are the outputs consumed?