This line links to the GPT-3 paper, which was published in 2020 about a model trained in 2019 - so that’s six years ago, not three.
I also find the specific claims made about ‘three years ago’ to be confusing: Three years ago (early 2023) GPT-4 already existed, which could do pretty hard calculus problems.
And three years ago (again, early 2023), Microsoft Copilot had already been a product for a year and a half (released summer 2021), which certainly was capable of writing lines of code. I’m not sure the exact % of OpenAI employees who used it day-to-day, but it was substantial.
This all leads me to wonder what happened in this particular passage. (I don’t think this is super significant for the impact of the piece overall though.)
I wonder if parts of this essay were written a few years ago & not updated for publication?
This is the part that most strongly suggests it IMO:
This line links to the GPT-3 paper, which was published in 2020 about a model trained in 2019 - so that’s six years ago, not three.
I also find the specific claims made about ‘three years ago’ to be confusing: Three years ago (early 2023) GPT-4 already existed, which could do pretty hard calculus problems.
And three years ago (again, early 2023), Microsoft Copilot had already been a product for a year and a half (released summer 2021), which certainly was capable of writing lines of code. I’m not sure the exact % of OpenAI employees who used it day-to-day, but it was substantial.
This all leads me to wonder what happened in this particular passage. (I don’t think this is super significant for the impact of the piece overall though.)