There's a lot of talk about AGI, or whether GPT is valuable or not based on its tendency to be confidently incorrect. I think this misses the point made by cs702: GPT is a machine learning model that is available to anyone, with no knowledge required. Plain language in, plain language out.

This is very valuable if you have a vague idea that machine learning will be helpful for your problem, but you don't want to go to the trouble of preparing data / hiring a data science team. Or if your ML model would benefit from having access to all of the data and collective wisdom of the internet. Or if you don't understand what machine learning is but still want to make basic predictions with available data.

It can apply what I've been thinking of as "common sense by api". For example, a brand advertiser can ask "Is it appropriate to show this ad to this customer?" to avoid showing ie, a pregnancy ad to a teenager. There has never been anything like this before. You had to hire a human to make decisions like that or program every edge case into the code.

I've been experimenting with this for weeks. From everything I've seen its a powerful general purpose machine learning model that is valuable in a small number of specific situations. I still don't have a full grasp of the boundaries and limitations, but its really an amazing thing. And its only going to get better with GPT4. I think most of the discussion around the technology is ignoring what its really providing to the world.