Did a Person Write This Headline, or a Machine?

Photograph: Charles Taylor / Getty Images. Article by Tom Simonite.

GPT-3, a new text-generating program from OpenAI, shows how far the field has come—and how far it has to go.

THE TECH INDUSTRY pays programmers handsomely to tap the right keys in the right order, but earlier this month entrepreneur Sharif Shameem tested an alternative way to write code.

First he wrote a short description of a simple app to add items to a to-do list and check them off once completed. Then he submitted it to an artificial intelligence system called GPT-3 that has digested large swaths of the web, including coding tutorials. Seconds later, the system spat out functioning code. “I got chills down my spine,” says Shameem. “I was like, ‘Woah something is different.’”

GPT-3, created by research lab OpenAI, is provoking chills across Silicon Valley. The company launched the service in beta last month and has gradually widened access. In the past week, the service went viral among entrepreneurs and investors, who excitedly took to Twitter to share and discuss results from prodding GPT-3 to generate memes, poems, tweets, and guitar tabs. […]

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