In 2021, GPT-3 Made a Bold Prediction About Covid. It Was Completely Right.
Today, the World Health Organization made a stunning declaration — the Covid-19 pandemic is officially over. The virus is endemic, and its presence no longer constitutes a public health emergency.
When the pandemic was in full swing in 2020 and 2021, no one expected that it would be several more years before there’d be an end in sight. No one, that is, except GPT-3.
GPT-3 is the predecessor to today’s wildly successful ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, it was only available to researchers, businesses, and academic users. As an OpenAI Beta tester, I got access to GPT-3 back in 2020.
The original version was only trained on data captured through 2019. As I was experimenting with the system in 2021, I realized this provided a unique opportunity. GPT-3 knew nothing about Covid-19, which had emerged after it was trained.
What would happen, I wondered, if I taught GPT-3 about Covid-19, and then asked it to make some predictions about the course of the pandemic? Could it provide useful information on the pandemic’s likely future course?
It turns out that GPT-3 — even at a much earlier stage than today’s OpenAI models — could do some impressive predictive work. I wrote up my experiment in this story, which was published in September…
