AN EMERGENT QUALITY

The other day I was doing some research about the beginnings of Open AI, and I came across an article from the NYTimes from November 2020. Here is the link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intelligence-ai-gpt3.html

I was very surprised because at this time I had no idea what Open AI was. But here was this article talking about this new company that had unveiled a new technology called GPT-3. 😮😮 I couldn´t believe it. Here it was: a technology that I would start using about 2 years later.

I kept on reading, and a couple of things were kind of surprising. It mentioned that some of the people that got to use it first began to notice that it could actually do unexpected things like, generate tweets, translate languages, summarize emails and even generate its own programs. All tasks that today we take for granted that ChatGPT can do. But back then, this was not expected to happen. Say what? 😯😯

This interesting behavior surprised its own developers. Here is an excerpt from the article;

¨ “It has this emergent quality,” said Dario Amodei, vice president for research at OpenAI. “It has some ability to recognize the pattern that you gave it and complete the story, give another example.”

“It exhibits a capability that no one thought possible,” said Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, ¨

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and IIya Sutskever

Another AI Researcher said;

“It is surprising to me, and to a lot of people,” said Melanie Mitchell, an A.I. researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent lab in New Mexico, who is among those experimenting with the system. “It is hard to figure out exactly what this thing is doing.”

No one had built GPT-3 to generate code, or summarize emails etc. No, not at all! It was built to do just one thing: predict the next word in a sequence of words. But here it is. It has taken the world by storm. Most predictions are that it will transform everything.

EMERGENT

The one word that got my full attention was the word EMERGENT. What is an emergent quality? Everything starts with smaller parts that combine to make increasingly complex systems. This helps living organisms to better adapt to their environments and increase their chances of survival. An example is our lungs. They help us breathe due to all the cells in them working as a unit. The cells by themselves do not help us in breathing at all.

Emergence can also mean that something is ´coming into existence´.

So, I had to ask. And I did.

It is being trained. Is this training being done well? Is it being done carefully? No one really knows. It is the question that needs an answer for in the end, a powerful emerging creature could decide our future.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas