Comment by titzer

It's so wild that the bar for AI performance is both absurdly high and absurdly low at the same time. To specify an output format (language or grammar) for solving a computational problem is one of the oldest exercises around. On the one hand, it's breathtakingly mundane that the model can now do the most basic of tasks: conform to an output specification. It's weird reading the kind of self-congratulating blogpost about this, like OpenAI has just discovered flint knives. On the other hand, a computer system can process natural language with extremely ambiguous, open-ended problems, compute solutions to said problems, even correct its own mistakes--and then it can format the output correctly. And then on yet another hand, it only took about 10^25 floating point operations (yeah, just ten million trillion trillion, right!?) to get this outcome.