I worked for a startup called Powerset in 2007 that tried to build something like this. We spent $100M and it was bought by MSFT to become Bing in 2008.

A single engineer can now build something that is literally an order of magnitude better in less than an hour with GPT-3. https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060

It's a whole new world. I don't think we're ready for it yet.

Even the way you use the GPT-3 API is wild.

You just pass it a text string with what you want it do in plain English (or give it a few examples) until it does what you want.

I mean it sounds like I'm oversimplifying it but I'm really not:

e.g. to build a search engine, you send:

"This is a Q&A session between a human and an AI that knows everything.

Q: <Query>
A:"

If you replace <Query> with "What is human life expectancy in the United States?", then it would send back: "78.6 years." < Actual GTP-3 response.

This means all of the mindblowing GPT-3 demos you're seeing on Twitter are just people typing in different plain English prompts to the API like "This is the code for a React app that <app description>" or "This is a summary of the following text <user text>".

That's it!

If you think the GPT-3 demos are amazing, the API is mindblowing on a meta level.

All of those demos work by *simply describing what you want to do in plain English*.

If you can *describe* it, you can now build it.

We're just not ready for this. https://twitter.com/Loh/status/1284832205215129601

Also didn’t mean this as a drag on Powerset. This was an incredible team that I was proud to be part of building a web scale search engine with a new approach in 2007, and it worked.

https://twitter.com/chad_walters/status/1284864217623916544?s=21 https://twitter.com/chad_walters/status/1284864217623916544

You could go build a magical command line right now if you integrate the API into a shell and prime GPT-3 with:

“This is a list of plain English sentences translated into shell commands:

English: show all files recursively in path
Shell: ls -Ra

English: <UserQuery>
Shell:”

You can build a tweetstorm button that will add new tweets to any tweetstorm by hooking up a button to the GPT-3 API and just pass it the tweets so far in the thread.

https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1284883524164583425

(All further tweets in my tweetstorm from this point on will be generated by GPT-3)

It's just too easy to build something with GPT-3. I think we're all going to have a lot of fun with this.

The whole world is going to be in awe of this thing. I'm already blown away.

It's literally the AI equivalent of having a printing press at your disposal.

GPT-3 is literally going to change the world.

The implications of GPT-3 are so far reaching that I don't even know where to begin. It's like the internet was for computing.

GPT-3 is the biggest technological leap since the invention of the computer.

If you're interested in building something with GPT-3, I recommend just playing around with the API and see what you can build. It's really fun.

I'm going to keep tweeting my thoughts on this as I try to wrap my head around it.

/FIN

^ As mentioned above ... the final 3 tweets in this tweetstorm were 100% written by GPT-3.