The Connection Between Predicting and Understanding

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In order to predict, it essentially has to learn all these different subtasks. You cannot guess what the detective will say at the end of the book without really going into the meaning of the novel. And this is the link between prediction and understanding or at least this is an intuitive link between those two. Right. If a neural network would do a really good job at predicting the next word, including this word, then it would suggest that it understood something very significant about the novel. That's exactly right. So even though you never program the system to write poetry or translate languages or do simple math problems, it learns how to do all those things. The only way to get capabilities like this

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Can machines actually be intelligent? What sorts of tasks are narrower or broader than we usually believe? GPT-3 was trained to do a "single" task: predicting the next word in a body of text; so why does it seem to understand so many things? What's the connection between prediction and comprehension? What breakthroughs happened in the last few years that made GPT-3 possible? Will academia be able to stay on the cutting edge of AI research? And if not, then what will its new role be? How can an AI memorize actual training data but also generalize well? Are there any conceptual reasons why we couldn't make AIs increasingly powerful by just scaling up data and computing power indefinitely? What are the broad categories of dangers posed by AIs?

Ilya Sutskever is Co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, which aims to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. He leads research at OpenAI and is one of the architects behind the GPT models. Prior to OpenAI, Ilya was co-inventor of AlexNet and Sequence to Sequence Learning. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Follow him on Twitter at @ilyasut.

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