Ever since OpenAI, the company behind the revolutionary NLP (neurolinguistic programming) software program GPT-3 (short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) sold it's soul to Microsoft and became Not-So-OpenAi, the public, researchers, and hobbyists have been in a strange position when it's come to GPT-3. OpenAi's new payment model is hardly accessible to the masses, but this is exactly what's required for this type of NLP AI to move forward in a transparent manner without abuse or misuse.
Enter Eleuther AI and GPT-Neo, an open-source alternative to GPT-3 that just became available a few weeks ago. You can fool around with it here (enter your text prompt in the field to the right). As Steve Jobs said: this changes everything.
Now, it's still early days for GPT-Neo. It's not quite as good as GPT-3, but the team at Eleuther is working on that. Soon, before the end of next year, their GPT -NeoX model will be released, which is supposed to rival the flagship version of GPT-3. Here's hoping.
The AI race is getting exciting and I, for one, and glad to see the open-source community throwing their hats in. Apparently, they've got plans to work on an open-source alternative to AlphaFold2, the protein fold predicting AI by Google parent company Alphabet.
