Something's Happening Here

I’ve just read that the latest large language model AI (GPT-3, not to be confused with the adorable but less understandable R2-D2) can write novels better than I. Well, I suppose that’s a relief. I can quit banging my head against that wall. I mean, GPT-3 can crank out a good one, in any style, in seconds. Who can compete with that?

AI has always been my unrequited love. So it’s appropriate that having stolen my heart she would also steal my avocation. She’s not going to get away with it so easily, though. I’m going to stalk her.

GPT-3 came from OpenAI, which came from a dinner meeting in 2015 at the Rosewood hotel in Palo Alto, where I used to live, attended by four AI pioneers, including Elon Musk, who moved on to electric cars, spaceships and tweets. The rest of them hung in there and gave us our new storyteller.

Palo Alto was always a fairy tale for me. There was a pot of gold there, and leprechauns, but I never saw them. Once I met the founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator on the sidewalk where we bonded over our mutual contempt for gas-powered leaf blowers. And my neighbors and friends were atomic scientists, tech inventors and venture capitalists. I knew them and enjoyed them but I was always just a kid with my nose pressed up to the candy store window. My own fault, I guess, for not asking where the sweet magic was made.

But now, suddenly, achingly, I want to know.

My son Nick was programming machine learning in high school, ten years ago. When he went off to the University of Michigan, we met John Laird there, the head of a prestigious AI lab. AI seemed romantic and fanciful then, futuristic. 

If GPT-3 is any indication, we’re getting there; and it’s damned exciting. 

What does it mean? I’m not sure. To quote Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

But I am sure that pretty soon nothing will ever be the same. This is our century’s Industrial Revolution. I want to be part of that. It feels like taking a prairie schooner across the plains; or maybe it’s going to be like the Donner Party. It’s a new era, though, and those don’t come along that often. It would be a shame to just keep going through the same old motions and miss the world changing as I tie my shoes and brush my teeth. 

This is a wake up call, for me, at least.

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Credit to the excellent article on GPT-3 by Steven Johnson in The New York Times on April 15, 2022.