There was some good discussion about this on another GPT-3 this weekend, but I don't have the link handy.

The author prompted GPT-3 with some questions like, what is 10-1 (9), 100-1 (99), 1000-1 (999), 10000-1 (9099); i.e. after a while, it can't really "recurse" deeply enough to get the right answer anymore. The author also asked it some coding questions; it could answer something like "write a Ruby function to count the number of Xs in a word" but not "reverse the list [foo bar baz]" (not the exact examples, sorry). There again seems to be a point where it gets the idea, but can't compute deeply enough to actually answer this sort of question.

Edit: I found it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887637

Being the author of The Program, a fiction podcast described by fans as "a love child of Black Mirror and NPR", I've been following news around GPT-3 very closely.

So I decided to make an episode depicting a fictionalized origin story of GPT-3. The twist is that I incorporated actual text generated by GPT-3 to tell the narrative (even the episode title has been generated by it!)

To this end, I used four excellent articles and wonderful HN discussions that ensued as sources of inspiration and insight. Some of the comments have made it into the episode almost verbatim (of course, all have been properly credited in the show's references).

I'm talking about:

https://tinkeredthinking.com/index.php?id=841 - discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23923799

https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2020/05#gpt-3 - discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623845

https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h... - discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887637

https://arr.am/2020/07/25/gpt-3-uncertainty-prompts - discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989215

Additionally, I partnered up with a startup called Narration Box to synthesize the computer voice of GPT-3, which I connected with back when I originally unveiled The Program on HN (you might be glad to hear the show recently passed 100,000 downloads).

This community has been nothing but good to me so I thought you might be interested to check out the latest work of whimsy it inspired. You can find the episode in question at the URL above or in your favourite podcast app (search for "The Program audio series" (full title) and find the latest episode).

Comments / feedback welcome!