GPT-3: Intelligent A.I. or Vacant Programming?

Are you scared yet, human?

A recent article published in the Guardian caught the attention of internet users worldwide. Unlike ordinary works of journalism that go viral, however, this particular piece was not written by a human. In a style that is evocative and attention-grabbing, The Guardian aptly titled it: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”

The “robot” in question is GPT-3, or “Generative Pre-Trained Transformative 3”, OpenAI’s third iteration of an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. GPT-3 was prompted to write an essay to convince humans that robots come in peace.

The looming question is: does GPT-3 truly exhibit intelligence?

Intelligence, Narrow AI and General AI

In order to have a meaningful and nuanced discussion over this topic, we first need to define intelligence.

AI researcher Max Tegmark has, in my view, provided the most succinct and clear definition of intelligence:

intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals.

Artificial intelligence can be defined as a broad area of computer science that makes machines…