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GPT-3 & Friends

Published:

Jul 25, 2020


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Published:

Jul 25, 2020


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Imagine a technology that could automatically generate code for you, come up with your viral tweets, and perhaps write this newsletter... well it’s here.

Machine learning got a massive upgrade this week - the awaited launch of GPT-3 (or Generative Pre-training Transformer 3rd generation). GPT-3, not to be confused with C-3PO of Star Wars fame, is a sophisticated language model that can take inputs like “create a webpage” or “list the Fortune 100 companies in a table” and the result is simply a webpage or a perfectly populated excel table. The artificial intelligence model can perform these tasks with high precision since it effectively ingests all of the text available on the Internet.

Under the hood, it uses language models that statistically predict what the next set of words in a sentence should be, based on the first set of words given. The new model has ingested half a trillion words and is set on 175 billion parameters, the latter of which allows the model to contextually identify if a piece of text is non-fiction or fantasy, health or sports, a pitcher or an outfielder. The latest model has 10x more parameters than its predecessors (and friends) like GPT-2, set on 1.5 billion parameters, or Turing NLG, 17 billion, or BERT, a measly 340 million.

When adequately primed by a human, it can write creative fiction, generate functioning code, compose proprietary music, and much more. In terms of its implications for the financial world, the technology can be used for sentiment analysis, transaction data collection and visualization (it may plot pretty charts!), mundane contract write-ups and analysis, financial advice generation, and crypto quant strategies.

Although we are a while from artificial intelligence technologies taking over our newsletter - we know for certain that GPT-3 and friends will be giving us a hand sooner than later (well, maybe not BERT)...

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GPT-3 & Friends


OpenAI’s massive GPT-3 model is impressive, but size isn’t everything - At 175b parameters it’s the largest of its kind. And with a memory size exceeding 350GB, it’s one of the priciest, costing an estimated $12m to train. Fortunately for competitors, experts believe that while GPT-3 and similarly large systems are impressive with respect to their performance, they don’t move the ball forward on the research side of the equation. Rather, they’re prestige projects that simply demonstrate the scalability of existing techniques. Read more

Why everyone is talking about the A.I. text generator released by an Elon Musk-backed lab - Social media is awash with people talking about a new piece of software called GPT-3, which is a language-generation tool capable of producing human-like text on demand. The software learned how to produce text by analyzing vast quantities on the internet and observing which letters and words tend to follow one another. Read more

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Selina Finance - London based alternative lender which provides credit to business borrowers raised £12m in Series A funding led by GFC and Picus Capital. Read more


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