GPT-3: 300 apps and 4.5B words a day

After we saw GPT-3 — OpenAI’s gargantuan language model that doesn’t need finetuning — used for lots of cool demos, the model’s API now powers 300+ apps and outputs an average of 4.5 billion (!) words per day. OpenAI published a blog post describing some of these apps, including Viable, which summarizes and answers questions about survey responses, and Agolia, a website plugin for semantically searching through content. Cool stuff! As the OpenAI API scales up to power more products, though, one thing to keep a close eye on will be how often it outputs problematic responses in production systems. Abid et al. (2021) have shown that GPT-3 has a persistent anti-Muslim bias, and TNW’s Tristan Greene got a GPT-3-powered chatbot to spit out racist and anti-LGBT slurs. The OpenAI API runs a content filter on top of the raw GPT-3 model to prevent such responses from reaching end-users (which is pretty strict in my experience: when I was playing around with the beta, I couldn’t get it to say bad things without labeling them as potentially problematic) but no filter is ever perfect. We’ll see what happens in the coming few years, but I do expect that the good and useful products will outweigh the occasional bad response.