Thoughts and Theory, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Definitions, Results, Hype, Problems, Critiques, & Counter-Critiques.
In May 2020, Open AI published a groundbreaking paper titled Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners. They presented GPT-3, a language model that holds the record for being the largest neural network ever created with 175 billion parameters. It’s an order of magnitude larger than the largest previous language models. GPT-3 was trained with almost all available data from the Internet, and showed amazing performance in various NLP (natural language processing) tasks, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, even surpassing state-of-the-art models.
One of the most powerful features of GPT-3 is that it can perform new tasks (tasks it has never…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | DEEP LEARNING | FUTURE
I worked for 3 years at an AI company. Now I’ve decided to leave the industry indefinitely.
3 years ago the words Artificial Intelligence evoked powerful sensations in me. Entering that world felt like taking a step into the mysteries and secrets of the future. I was mind-blown by the promises of intelligent machines, capable of solving tasks forever reserved to us. I was deep-diving into the amazement of the mind through the familiar passages of technology.
I had just finished my bachelor’s in aerospace engineering and wanted to leap towards AI. It was late 2017 when I met the great Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng. …
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
There are hundreds of articles about GPT-3. Here’s a 5-min compilation of everything there’s to know about it.
A month ago I published this 35-minute-long overview of GPT-3. But I value your time as a reader, so I decided to write a super-condensed 5-minute article. I’ve summarized the main ideas from the longer article: What GPT-3 is, what it can do, and its present and future impact on the world. Enjoy!
What GPT-3 is
GPT-3 is the third version of OpenAI’s family of Generative Pre-Trained models. GPT-1 and GPT-2 laid the foundations for GPT-3, proving the success of two key hypotheses: Transformers+unsupervised pre-training works fine (GPT-1) and language models can multitask (GPT-2).
GPT-3 is a language model based in the transformer…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | SOCIETY
OpenAI’s CEO made a prediction that could change everything.
Centuries have passed since Talos, the giant Greek automaton, walked the shores of Crete. He was a gift from the god Hephaestus, the myth goes, to protect European people from pirates and invaders. Today, we don’t believe in giant bronze robots sent by divine providence. Today, we’re the ones automating the world.
Although AI was born in the 50s, it wasn’t until the 90s that we got openly worried about its potential disruption to human jobs. Modern technology had long begun to affect the workforce in several industries (as has happened repeatedly throughout history), but AI felt like the Great…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
And why I studied cognitive science instead.
When I graduated in 2017 from aerospace engineering I knew I wanted to work in AI. Andrew Ng and Geoffrey Hinton were my teachers and Coursera was my university. They helped me land a job at an AI startup where I worked from late 2017 to late 2020.
In those 3 years I found time to take a master’s degree. But I knew I didn’t want to study AI formally — I chose the cognitive sciences instead. I was reticent to enroll in a university to learn about a field that was only recently blooming and was changing fast even…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Here’s why we may create AGI without knowing it.
There’s so much interest in artificial general intelligence (AGI) that we could fill up an entire Chinese room with books written about it. Yet, you wouldn’t find in them any conclusive finding or theory. No one knows what AGI will look like, when we’ll achieve it, or how we should proceed to the next step. If we have no answers regarding AGI, why are there so many books, articles, and papers written about it?
Physicist Lawrence Krauss joked about this paradox in a conversation with Noam Chomsky. He said there’s “an inverse relationship between what’s known in a field and…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is advancing fast, here are the latest models you need to know.
GPT-3 is already old if we compare it with what AI is showing us this year. Since the transformer came out in 2017, it has seen wild success in diverse tasks, from language to vision. GPT-3 revolutionized the world last year and since then multiple breakthrough models have been presented. Countries and companies are immersed in a race to build better and better models.
The premise is that bigger models, bigger datasets, and more computational power comprise the AI-dominance trinity. Even if this paradigm has important detractors, its success is simply undeniable.
In this article, I’ll review the 5 most…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | AI ETHICS
OpenAI has found a way to reduce AI bias.
AI is currently facing a crucial battle: Ethics.
10 years ago deep learning started getting very popular, very fast. Soon, people began asking difficult questions: Could AI take our jobs in the future? Could it be used in digital wars across the globe? Could it overrule and dominate us eventually? Great obstacles awaited ahead in a tumultuous path. Yet, we were overlooking other, more pressing problems that were already happening before our eyes.
Deep learning models are trained with huge amounts of data. Those data are created and compiled by humans. Biased humans. Data generated in an imperfect world is…
Getting Started, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is wonderful, but we should approach it the right way.
Learning artificial intelligence saved me from working at a boring job.
I started studying AI right away after finishing my undergrad in aerospace engineering. After 4 months of studying courses, papers, books, and trying things out for myself, I landed a dream job: A R&D project to build a real-time bidirectional sign-language translator. Something that didn’t exist. I was about to create the future!
Those 4 months allowed me to escape a life I would surely have hated. I wanted something more exciting, like reverse-engineer our brain and mind. I deep-dived into a new, unexplored world that showed me its…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | DATA SCIENCE
Here’s why programmers don’t need to panic.
OpenAI released GPT-3's beta API in July 2020. Soon thereafter, developers started experimenting with the system and raised the hype to the sky, leading people to make strong claims about GPT-3's power. The system was qualified as “sentient,” capable of “reasoning and understanding,” or even as a “general intelligence.”
Frederik Bussler wrote an article that went viral on Towards Data Science in which he brought an important matter into the discussion: Could GPT-3 kill coding as we know it? For some years now, we’ve seen trends aiming at automating coding or, at the very least, reducing human involvement.
Bussler mentions…
