When speaking of billion dollar investments, a billion dollar industry is not substantial. Google and Facebook's industries are advertising, at $600bn/year. Amazon's industry is retail, at $25tn/year.
What's opened up by the GPT-3 and its prompt-programming abilities is services, without qualification. That's $50tn/year, and capturing some tiny percentage of it is what's needed to make a billion-dollar investment worthwhile.
That said, I admit this isn't the mindset most people take when they read 'substantial'.
e: I changed the wording from 'substantial' to 'transformative', thanks!
GPT-3 lets you create rigged demos to do lots of tasks but so far it's not reliable enough to do anything in production. It seems unlikely to get there using output based on random word selection. Nobody is even talking about error rates yet.
The best applications are probably when error rates don't matter because a human is just going to use it for inspiration.
I might have missed the business plan behind monetising GPT3 here.
Can you elaborate on why you think prompt programming will successfully take a cut from services?
Prompt-programming is a standard features of all LMs. What differentiates GPT3 is not this application but the quality of the output. NLP companies such as chatbot providers and specialised search (patents, legal assistants, tenders) have been using domain-specific LMs for years.
You both agree I think. He's not saying that GPT-3 invented the revolutionary ability of prompt programming, but that prompt programming allows GPT-3 to be applied to arbitrary contexts (from programming to providing legal advice to generating fiction). That amazing generality and high quality allow it to be applicable to most services.
When speaking of billion dollar investments, a billion dollar industry is not substantial. Google and Facebook's industries are advertising, at $600bn/year. Amazon's industry is retail, at $25tn/year.
What's opened up by the GPT-3 and its prompt-programming abilities is services, without qualification. That's $50tn/year, and capturing some tiny percentage of it is what's needed to make a billion-dollar investment worthwhile.
That said, I admit this isn't the mindset most people take when they read 'substantial'.
e: I changed the wording from 'substantial' to 'transformative', thanks!