While GPT-3 can string words together in convincing ways, it has no idea what the words mean.
If computers can defeat the most talented human players of chess, Go, and Jeopardy, they surely can outperform humans in any task — or so the thinking goes. That brings us to the recent hullabaloo about an AI program that can pen such compelling writing that it seems to be naturally intelligent. It's called OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model (LLM), and though the name is obscure to a layperson — GPT-3 is short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, which doesn't explain much more — what it does is relatively simple: GPT-3 can engage in remarkably articulate conversations and write compelling essays, stories, and even research papers. Many people—even some computer scientists—are convinced that GPT-3 demonstrates that computers now are (or soon will be) smarter than humans. As a finance professor and statistician who has written several books on AI and data science, I find this belief fanciful.
