Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Today we are going to use OpenAI’s new language model AI to get it to
write our homework essays for us, see how well it does that, and get this,
we will even ask it to write some computer code for us. And it gets even better,
it does all this for free! But not in the way you think. You will find out in a moment why.
Now, let’s see. First, we write, “When I was young, I only liked to p”. And then,
let’s say something comes here between, and then, “and that’s how first I got interested in
AI research.” Now we ask the AI to fill in the middle part. Let’s see what happens together.
This indeed filled in the middle. It says, when I was young, I only liked to play
video games. I would play sometimes more than 13 hours per day. The rush, novelty,
and variety were beyond anything real life could offer. (Whoa, hold it right there,
little AI!) It continues - I loved the challenge and I excelled at it. I would
often skip classes and go to and that’s how first I got interested in AI research.
But there is a problem. Did you notice the problem? Yes, the video game addiction is
kind of a problem. But, that’s not what I meant. It gets worse. Grammatically,
it kind of connects to the suffix, the text that comes after, it is not nearly perfect,
but, perhaps the worst thing is that there is no logical connection between them. It
does not explain how we ended up being an AI researcher. Although Demis Hassabis, the CEO of
the DeepMind AI lab often says in interviews that he played a ton of video games back in his day,
so this AI may be up to something. But this new method can do way better. Look.
“When I was young, I only liked to play video games. Over time, I started thinking if it’d be
possible to make bots to play better than any human can ever play these games. I eventually
decided I liked working on the latter more than playing the games themselves and that’s how first
I got interested in AI research.” Now that’s a scholarly completion! Excellent. Loving it.
And, it has more absolutely magical capabilities. For instance, here,
we can start diving into our narrative immediately by talking about Wikipedia,
and, look. If we give it some space before it, the AI will recognize that
telling the audience what Wikipedia is is necessary, and it does it. Really cool!
And, if we feel even lazier, we can write the start of the story, the end of the story,
and now, off you go little AI, and you do the hard work. Let’s read it. The
commercial diver finally thought he’d snagged a big catch when he saw something white. But
then he quickly realized it wasn’t a fish − he was wrangling an alligator. That is
a great story. Bravo. I made sure to look it up, white alligators apparently exist.
And it does not stop at writing essays. Now hold on to your papers,
because it can also write computer code for us. Let’s see.
It can finish our code that sorts a list, computes the average of numbers, or even performs prime
factorization. But how does it do all this? Is this some crazy mind-reading AI? Well,
not quite. It is very good, but it does not read our thoughts. It reads our comments. These are
not part of the computer code, these comments are a crutch to explain what the next block of code
is about to do. And, with that, the AI knows how it can help us out. This feels like magic. Just
imagine how much easier this makes a bunch of coding work for us. And what incredible speedup
in productivity we can expect from techniques like this. Mind-blowing. What a time to be alive!
But wait, of course, not even this technique is perfect. Sometimes it just does not know when
to stop. And sometimes, it just keeps repeating itself. Alright, we get it, little AI. Thank you!
And, there is one more feature that I loved when reading this paper. You see, normally,
you would need to train a separate neural network for this fill in the middle capability. However,
the coolest thing here is that it can generate continuous text from left to right,
just like the good old GPT-3 AI and other variants. And, at the same time,
this can also fill in the middle without being explicitly trained
to do that. Oh yes! That’s right - we get this amazing capability essentially for free.
So, what do you think? Does this get your mind going? Let
me know in the comments below, and let the experiments begin!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!