What is GPT-3?

GPT-3 was the third in the series of GPT (generative pretrained transformer) large transformer-based language models created by OpenAI. It was announced in June 2020, and was 100 times larger (in terms of number of parameters) than its predecessor GPT-2.

GPT-3 was superseded by GPT-3.5 (March 2022), ChatGPT (November 2022) and GPT-4 (March 2023).

Gwern produced several resources exploring GPT-3's abilities, limitations, and implications including:

The appearance of GPT-3 marked a noticeable shift where powerful AI systems began to be discussed in wider cultural circles beyond computer science (e.g., Vox published this article in August 2020 explaining its significance to a popular audience).