This answer likely betrays my lack of imagination, but I’m not sure what Google would use GPT-3 for. It’s probably much more expensive than whatever gmail uses to predict text, and the additional accuracy might not provide much additional value.
Maybe they could sell it as a service, as part of GCP? I’m not sure how many people inside Google have the ability to sign $15M checks, you would need at least one of them to believe in a large market, and I’m personally not sure there’s a large enough market for GPT-3 for it to be worth Google’s time.
This is all to say, I don’t think you should draw the conclusion that Google is either stupid or hiding something. They’re likely focusing on finding better architectures, it seems a little early to focus on scaling up existing ones.
Not really. It’s perfectly possible to make accurate quantitative economic predictions.
1. I think we are all relatively confident that by 2021-01-01 more than 100k deaths will be attributed to COVID-19 (globally). Even though the market has certainly “priced it in”, that change in prices doesn’t change the underlying reality. There are economic realities, such as the number of people who are likely to be unemployed, which are not meaningfully influenced by changes in asset prices.
2. We know that tourism revenue will be greatly depressed over the next few months. Carnival Corporation, for example (the largest cruise ship operator), will probably make 80% less money than it would have had the pandemic not happened. I know this because the price was at $52 and now it’s at $13. Asset prices *are* strong quantitative predictions! I agree that we’re unlikely to be able to make predictions which beat those of the market. But epistemically that’s great news! You now have a mountain of asset prices to make predictions with. e.g. VIX futures are still expensive, the market is expecting the situation to evolve rapidly.