The internet can't stop talking about an AI program that can write such artful prose that it seems to pass the Turing Test. College students are writing papers with it, internet marketers are using it to write marketing copy, and numerous others are just having earnest and fun conversations with it about the meaning of life. The AI chatbot in question is called GPT-3, and it's the latest iteration of a long project from the company OpenAI. Short for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3," GPT-3 is what is known to computer scientists as a large language model (LLM).
Yet all of this hullabaloo surrounding GPT-3 obscures one simple fact about LLMs: they are essentially text generators. Very complicated ones, indeed, but they are not "smart" in the human sense; and though they may sound like people that you are conversing with, this is all smoke and mirrors. There is no brain there.
