At the end of May, OpenAI published a paper on GPT-3, a language model which is a successor to their previous version, GPT-2. While quite impressive, the reaction from many people interested in artificial intelligence has been seriously exaggerated. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has said as much himself:

The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out.

I used “GPT-N” in the title here because most of the comments I intend to make are almost completely general, and will apply to any future version that uses sufficiently similar methods.

What it does

GPT-3 is a predictive language model, that is, given an input text it tries to predict what would come next, much in the way that if you read the first few words of this sentence with the rest covered up, you might try to guess what would be likely to come next. To the degree that it does this well, it can be used to generate text from a “prompt,” that is, we give it something like a few words or a few sentences, and then add whatever it predicts should come next. For example, let’s take this very blog post and see what GPT-3 would like to say:

What it doesn’t do

While GPT-3 does seem to be able to generate some pretty interesting results, there are several limitations that need to be taken into account when using it.

First and foremost, and most importantly, it can’t do anything without a large amount of input data. If you want it to write like “a real human,” you need to give it a lot of real human writing. For most people, this means copying and pasting a lot. And while the program is able to read through that and get a feel for the way humans communicate, you can’t exactly use it to write essays or research papers. The best you could do is use it as a “fill in the blank” tool to write stories, and that’s not even very impressive.

While the program does learn from what it reads and is quite good at predicting words and phrases based on what has already been written, this method isn’t very effective at producing realistic prose. The best you could hope for is something like the “Deep Writing Machine” Twitter account, which spits out disconnected phrases in an ominous, but very bland voice.

In addition, the model is limited only to language. It does not understand context or human thought at all, so it has no way of tying anything together. You could use it to generate a massive amount of backstory and other material for a game, but that’s about it.

Finally, the limitations in writing are only reinforced by the limitations in reading. Even with a large library to draw on, the program is only as good as the parameters set for it. Even if you set it to the greatest writers mankind has ever known, without any special parameters, its writing would be just like anyone else’s.

The Model

GPT-3 consists of several layers. The first layer is a “memory network” that involves the program remembering previously entered data and using it when appropriate (i.e. it remembers commonly misspelled words and frequently used words). The next layer is the reasoning network, which involves common sense logic (i.e. if A, then B). The third is the repetition network, which involves pulling previously used material from memory and using it to create new combinations (i.e. using previously used words in new orders).

I added the bold formatting, the rest is as produced by the model. This was also done in one run, without repetitions. This is an important qualification, since many examples on the internet have been produced by deleting something produced by the model and forcing it to generate something new until something sensible resulted. Note that the model does not seem to have understood my line, “let’s take this very blog post and see what GPT-3 would like to say.” That is, rather than trying to “say” anything, it attempted to continue the blog post in the way I might have continued it without the block quote.

Truth vs Probability of Text

If we interpret the above text from GPT-3 “charitably”, much of it is true or close to true. But I use scare quotes here because when we speak of interpreting human speech charitably, we are assuming that someone was trying to speak the truth, and so we think, “What would they have meant if they were trying to say something true?” The situation is different here, because GPT-3 has no intention of producing truth, nor of avoiding it. Insofar as there is any intention, the intention is to produce the text which would be likely to come after the input text; in this case, as the input text was the beginning of this blog post, the intention was to produce the text that would likely follow in such a post. Note that there is an indirect relationship with truth, which explains why there is any truth at all in GPT-3’s remarks. If the input text is true, it is at least somewhat likely that what would follow would also be true, so if the model is good at guessing what would be likely to follow, it will be likely to produce something true in such cases. But it is just as easy to convince it to produce something false, simply by providing an input text that would be likely to be followed by something false.

This results in an absolute upper limit on the quality of the output of a model of this kind, including any successor version, as long as the model works by predicting the probability of the following text. Namely, its best output cannot be substantially better than the best content in its training data, which is in this version is a large quantity of texts from the internet. The reason for this limitation is clear; to the degree that the model has any intention at all, the intention is to reflect the training data, not to surpass it. As an example, consider the difference between Deep Mind’s AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero. AlphaGo Zero is a better Go player than the original AlphaGo, and this is largely because the original is trained on human play, while AlphaGo Zero is trained from scratch on self play. In other words, the original version is to some extent predicting “what would a Go player play in this situation,” which is not the same as predicting “what move would win in this situation.”

Now I will predict (and perhaps even GPT-3 could predict) that many people will want to jump in and say, “Great. That shows you are wrong. Even the original AlphaGo plays Go much better than a human. So there is no reason that an advanced version of GPT-3 could not be better than humans at saying things that are true.”

The difference, of course, is that AlphaGo was trained in two ways, first on predicting what move would be likely in a human game, and second on what would be likely to win, based on its experience during self play. If you had trained the model only on predicting what would follow in human games, without the second aspect, the model would not have resulted in play that substantially improved upon human performance. But in the case of GPT-3 or any model trained in the same way, there is no selection whatsoever for truth as such; it is trained only to predict what would follow in a human text. So no successor to GPT-3, in the sense of a model of this particular kind, however large, will ever be able to produce output better than human, or in its own words, “its writing would be just like anyone else’s.”

Self Knowledge and Goals

OpenAI originally claimed that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release; ironically, they now intend to sell access to GPT-3. Nonetheless, many people, in large part those influenced by the opinions of Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, continue to worry that an advanced version might turn out to be a personal agent with nefarious goals, or at least goals that would conflict with the human good. Thus Alexander Kruel:

GPT-2: *writes poems*
Skeptics: Meh
GPT-3: *writes code for a simple but functioning app*
Skeptics: Gimmick.
GPT-4: *proves simple but novel math theorems*
Skeptics: Interesting but not useful.
GPT-5: *creates GPT-6*
Skeptics: Wait! What?
GPT-6: *FOOM*
Skeptics: *dead*

In a sense the argument is moot, since I have explained above why no future version of GPT will ever be able to produce anything better than people can produce themselves. But even if we ignore that fact, GPT-3 is not a personal agent of any kind, and seeks goals in no meaningful sense, and the same will apply to any future version that works in substantially the same way.

The basic reason for this is that GPT-3 is disembodied, in the sense of this earlier post on Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis. The only thing it “knows” is texts, and the only “experience” it can have is receiving an input text. So it does not know that it exists, it cannot learn that it can affect the world, and consequently it cannot engage in goal seeking behavior.

You might object that it can in fact affect the world, since it is in fact in the world. Its predictions cause an output, and that output is in the world. And that output and be reintroduced as input (which is how “conversations” with GPT-3 are produced). Thus it seems it can experience the results of its own activities, and thus should be able to acquire self knowledge and goals. This objection is not ultimately correct, but it is not so far from the truth. You would not need extremely large modifications in order to make something that in principle could acquire self knowledge and seek goals. The main reason that this cannot happen is the “P in “GPT,” that is, the fact that the model is “pre-trained.” The only learning that can happen is the learning that happens while it is reading an input text, and the purpose of that learning is to guess what is happening in the one specific text, for the purpose of guessing what is coming next in this text. All of this learning vanishes upon finishing the prediction task and receiving another input. A secondary reason is that since the only experience it can have is receiving an input text, even if it were given a longer memory, it would probably not be possible for it to notice that its outputs were caused by its predictions, because it likely has no internal mechanism to reflect on the predictions themselves.

Nonetheless, if you “fixed” these two problems, by allowing it to continue to learn, and by allowing its internal representations to be part of its own input, there is nothing in principle that would prevent it from achieving self knowledge, and from seeking goals. Would this be dangerous? Not very likely. As indicated elsewhere, motivation produced in this way and without the biological history that produced human motivation is not likely to be very intense. In this context, if we are speaking of taking a text-predicting model and adding on an ability to learn and reflect on its predictions, it is likely to enjoy doing those things and not much else. For many this argument will seem “hand-wavy,” and very weak. I could go into this at more depth, but I will not do so at this time, and will simply invite the reader to spend more time thinking about it. Dangerous or not, would it be easy to make these modifications? Nothing in this description sounds difficult, but no, it would not be easy. Actually making an artificial intelligence is hard. But this is a story for another time.