In its first few years, as it built up its programming brain trust, OpenAI’s technical achievements were mostly overshadowed by the star power of its founders. The supercomputer complex in Iowa is running a program created by OpenAI, an organization established in late 2015 by a handful of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Elon Musk Greg Brockman, who until recently had been chief technology officer of the e-payment juggernaut Stripe and Sam Altman, at the time the president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator. And the game is called: Guess what the missing word is.
Siri and Alexa popularized the experience of conversing with machines, but this was on the next level, approaching a fluency that resembled science fiction.Īnd what, you may ask, is this computational dynamo doing with all these prodigious resources? Mostly, it is playing a kind of game, over and over again, billions of times a second. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever - perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. But then the strangest thing happens: You notice that the writer has, seemingly deliberately, omitted the very last word of the first. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to get better at anticipating its consequences. The title suggested a story about a promising - but also potentially dangerous - new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story.
You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night.
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