GPT-3 and Generative AI
GPT-3 Isn’t Going to Replace Anything. It Lacks Conviction.
How Its biggest strength is holding it back
Great art requires conviction
Every day before going to bed I read a book until I fall asleep. One day I picked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and wasn’t able to sleep that day. The suspension is slowly and carefully built from the beginning and the ending will catch you by surprise and leave you baffled. I woke up and walked back and forth to process what had happened. It was a beautiful experience.
Great art requires a vision, a conviction to make the vision a reality, and an obsession to make it happen. Artists go to great lengths to make art.
The creator of Stardew Valley has spent 5 years building the game by himself. He has built his own game engine, made his own music, and designed his own characters. He was obsessed with perfection and did everything himself.
Today the game has sold over 20 million copies. Almost everyone who plays it is absorbed into a beautiful rural world that makes them feel at home.
Art that touches the soul requires great sacrifices from the artists.
GPT-3 lacks conviction
Don’t get me wrong, GPT-3 and generative AI are truly great inventions that are going to alter the way we live. But what makes me angry is people on the internet claiming it’s going to make artists obsolete. Some dude even claims it’s going to be the end of text-based social media platforms. What even?
Generative AI and large language models are by design trained to be uncertain. Given a context, they’re trained to spurt words that fit the context. They lack a sense of clarity. And this isn’t going to change by adding more data and compute, just like an airplane isn’t going to take you to the moon with more fuel. It’s a design constraint.
They may produce writing that sounds human, but they’ll never be able to make art that touches the soul.
When someone on Twitter accused Naval of being wrong when he said AI is never going to replace artists within our lifetime, He replied “You don’t even know what an artist is.”
Even Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI says:
ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.
The real use of GPT-3
GPT-3 is undoubtedly the best personalised search assistant. Recently, while researching for an article I asked it to tell me an ancient greek story on why letting go is important. The result is mind-boggling:
tell me an ancient greek story on why letting go is important:
The story of King Sisyphus is often used to explain the importance of letting go.
According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king of Corinth. He was known for his cleverness and trickery, and was determined to be the wisest of all mortals.
One day, Sisyphus decided to challenge the gods by trying to outsmart them. He boasted that he was so clever that even death could not capture him. In response, the gods cursed him to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again.
Sisyphus was determined to beat the gods and continued to push the boulder up the hill despite the futility of his efforts. He never stopped for fear of failure, and eventually, his determination and strength ran out.
At that moment, Sisyphus realized that he could never win against the gods, and finally let go of his pride and ambition. This realization allowed him to accept his fate and find peace in his eternal punishment.
Hence, the story of King Sisyphus teaches us the importance of letting go. We must accept that some things are beyond our control and strive to make peace with them.This is what future tech looks like. It makes google search seem pale in comparison.
However, it’s still unusable as it’s not robust and trustworthy. I might have to go back to google to search for the original source.
Conclusion
My prediction is every product and application would want to integrate GPT-3 as an intermediate interface with search being the primary motif.
I speculate the future of search is going to be generative with sources from which the data is sampled being cited.
It’s going to be more of a collaboration and the challenges would be on integration. It’s never going to replace artists or kill social media platforms.
Let me know your thoughts. Let’s connect.
