Recently, GPT-3, the groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) system built by San Francisco based research laboratory OpenAI, was asked about investing in various popular cryptocurrencies. This article presents the results.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, who “collectively pledged US$1 billion.”
On 20 February 2018, OpenAI announced via a blog post that Musk would be leaving the board, but would remain as an advisor and donor:
“Additionally, Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization. As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon.”
A year later, Musk, who is the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, confirmed on Twitter that he had not been “closely” involved with OpenAI for over a year and explained why he had left the AI company:
To clarify, I’ve not been involved closely with OpenAI for over a year & don’t have mgmt or board oversight
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2019
I had to focus on solving a painfully large number of engineering & manufacturing problems at Tesla (especially) & SpaceX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2019
Also, Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do. Add that all up & it was just better to part ways on good terms.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2019
A few days earlier, as Bloomberg reported, OpenAI had demonstrated how GPT-2 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 2), version 2 of a neural network powered generative language model it had created could generate realistic-sounding multi-paragraph fake news articles given just a lead paragraph.
As Bloomberg reported on 17 February 2019, OpenAI “decided not to publish or release the most sophisticated versions of the software because of misuse concerns, though it created a tool to let users experiment with the algorithm.”
GPT-3, the successor to GPT-2, was first described in a paper published in May. It was immediately clear that GPT-3 was the most powerful language model ever, offering 175 billion parameters in contrast to GTP-2’s 1.5 billion parameters.
As Slator noted last week, GPT-3 “has taken the Internet by storm.” Access to a closed private beta of GPT-3 was given to a small number of researchers, who then tweeted excitedly about the amazing capabilities of the system.
Here is one example:
Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future. I’ve gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. It's shockingly good. https://t.co/RvM6Qb3WIx
— arram (@arram) July 9, 2020
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman explained on July 20 why he thinks GPT-3 has resonated strongly with so many people:
Theory: a big part of what resonates about the GPT-3 API is that you program it with English, so any English speaker can use it, and it heavily rewards creativity.
For non-programmers, it's like experiencing the magic of programming for the first time.
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 20, 2020
Well, on Friday (July 24), Qiao Wang, former Head of Product at Messari, decided to ask GPT-3 some questions about investing in various popular cryptocurrencies.
Here were a few results:
Fun night hacking around with GPT-3: pic.twitter.com/07mKDKuVQU
— Qiao Wang (@QWQiao) July 24, 2020
— Qiao Wang (@QWQiao) July 24, 2020
— Qiao Wang (@QWQiao) July 24, 2020
These results should not come as too much of a surprise since it is still early days for this kind of AI software and it is important to note that GPT-3, even though it might be the greatest text generator the world has ever seen, does not really understand the meaning of what is writing about.
As Forbes pointed out on July 19:
“… GPT-3 possesses no internal representation of what these words actually mean. It has no semantically-grounded model of the world or of the topics on which it discourses. It cannot be said to understand its inputs and outputs in any meaningful way.”
And OpenAI’s CEO acknowledges the limitations of GPT-3:
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.
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 19, 2020