A few months ago a remarkable thing happened: I got a glimpse of the future.

OpenAI, a group of artificial intelligence researchers working towards developing benevolent AI gave me early access to a new API they were developing that would allow developers to utilize the most powerful text generator ever for GPT-3.

For background, a text generator is a neural network that tries to predict what should come next in a sequence of words. They’re a big deal because as I’m writing my brain is acting as a kind of text tgenerator deciding what I should type based upon the thoughts in my head. When your mail app or text application suggests words, that’s a similar kind of neural network at work.

What makes OpenAI’s API so remarkable is that it’s been trained by analyzing billions of examples, making it incredibly adept at picking up context and generating new text. Here are some examples of how intelligent it is.

Without any pre-training, if I give the API a list like this:

1. Batman 2. Superman 3. Cyborg

It will respond with something like this:

1. Batman
2. Superman
3. Cyborg
4. Flash
5. Martian Manhunter
6. Green Arrow
7. Hawkman

Okay…so what’s the big deal? Let’s break down what happened:

1. The API understood we were making a list.

2. The API understood we were making a list of superheroes.

3. It understood this was a list of DC superheroes.

If I gave those first three superhero names to most people, few would have followed up with only DC characters. The API picked up a pattern that isn’t obvious to everyone.

This ability to pick up patterns is what got me excited. I started playing around with the API nonstop and constantly pestered the people at OpenAI in a Slack channel asking questions and playing around with what could be done.

If the API can figure out you’re making a list of DC characters, what else could it do? What if I gave it three of my favorite science fiction novels?

1. Dune
2. Foundation
3. Player of Games

The API responded back with new suggestions:

1. Dune
2. Foundation
3. Player of Games
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
5. The Crystal Cave
6. Lucifer's Hammer
7. A Wizard of Earthsea
8. Hyperion
9. Desperation
10. The Mote in God's Eye
11. Ringworld

Not only are all the books from science-fiction and fantasy genres, out of the eight suggestions, I’ve read and loved five of them. The API didn’t just randomly suggest books. The neural network was able to make connections and create a list that was consistent with the first three entries. Fun fact: My last two Audible picks were from books the API suggested.

While that’s cool, the OpenAI API has so much more potential than just those examples. I have to emphasize that the API was never taught to make lists, figure out what’s a Marvel or DC character or make book suggestions. These were just random tasks that I threw at it and it was able to solve without hesitation. The only real limit was the imagination of the developer looking for ways to use it.