Tuesday, December 20, 2022

What It's Like To be a Computer: An Interview with GPT-3

There is this thing called the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing seventy years ago.  The idea is to see if a computer could become smart enough to fool a human into thinking he is talking to a real person.  We have crossed a threshold where computers have almost reached this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbB07n_uQ4

The AI appears to understand more than it actually does.  It has studied human conversation and a mountain of raw information so that it can imitate a human conversation.

However, having a conversational computer isn't the only threshold the machines have crossed recently.  Computer AI has become much more useful, performing all kinds of new tasks, such as surgery or writing computer code.  By the end of the decade, machines will be performing many more jobs.  It is very likely that in the next couple of decades, or even in this one, we will have general-purpose robots that could perform any task that we want them to do.