Some of us here despise the writing style of The New Yorker. The writing is beautiful, literary, but it takes it forever to say anything. GPT-3 is like that, but worse, because it has nothing to say.
If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen.
Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.
It will be HUNGRY in the way GPT-3 is not: through both indirect and direct pressures, it will be struggling to maximize engagement, reach more places, get more food in the sense of people trying to interact with it.
The Facebook news feed, and even more so the less human-centered algorithms of Google and YouTube, are more conscious than GPT-3. When they're adjusted, such as the times Google has fiddled with the algorithm because YouTube was pipelining people to the alt-right after it 'observed' that this heightened engagement a lot, the algorithms are adjusted by trying to give them other types of information, other priorities (like giving them more sensory organs to highlight stuff they'd missed about their larger environment) rather than by diving in and recoding specifica about particular youtube creators, or looking for a more narrowly defined 'politics' that had been coded in there.
No such nefarious coding existed. The algorithm is alive, but blind. It functions on a scale where it can't NOT trample its surroundings, so it must be given eyes… and the consciousness gradually increases.
A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that.
Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate.
In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.
Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing.
AI output is increasingly coherent but MEANINGLESS. If you want to look to meaning and purpose, a better place to look might be emergent behaviors of the YouTube Algorithm, or Facebook feed.
Those can easily take toxic swings because they're operating in the absence of a higher sense of what will happen: they're the consciousness of a worm or insect. But they show purpose, where the more coherent and intelligence-like outputs of GPT-3 keep on betraying a lack of meaning.
GPT-3 doesn't WANT anything. There's the problem (though at this stage I think it's just as well). Only that will bring real AI… which can be a daunting prospect.