THE ROLE MODELS
Episode art: The Escalator
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The Role Models · Season One · Episode 6 · 34 min

The Escalator

November 2019 to December 2020: OpenAI releases the full GPT-2, publishes the GPT-3 paper, opens a paid API, and licenses GPT-3 exclusively to Microsoft. Then, at the end of the year, an organizational update. Episode 6 of The Role Models asks the question the scaling era forced on the lab: once you can sell the thing, can you still slow it down?

0:00 / 33:47

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

Chapters

The Role Models, S01E06: "The Escalator"

Runtime: 33:47 · Season One · A Will Sigmon Media production Season / Episode: 1 / 6 · episodeType: full

Cold open

Tuesday, November fifth, two thousand nineteen. Nine months after OpenAI said it wouldn't release GPT-2, it releases GPT-2. All of it. The full model, one point five billion parameters, with the code and the weights. The post lists what they learned. People found the text convincing. Researchers at Cornell had people rate its credibility, and the full model scored six point nine one out of ten. Researchers at the Middlebury Institute showed it could be fine-tuned to write…

About this episode

November 2019 to December 2020: OpenAI releases the full GPT-2, publishes the GPT-3 paper, opens a paid API, and licenses GPT-3 exclusively to Microsoft. Then, at the end of the year, an organizational update. Episode 6 of The Role Models asks the question the scaling era forced on the lab: once you can sell the thing, can you still slow it down?

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

Beat outline / chapters

  • 0:00 Cold Open: No Strong Evidence
  • 2:11 Opening titles
  • 2:27 The Escalator From Hell
  • 3:34 Power Law
  • 4:47 Infinite Jest
  • 12:31 One Hundred Seventy-Five Billion
  • 15:32 Text In, Text Out
  • 17:36 The Same Exact Model
  • 20:46 A Thinking Robot
  • 24:21 TL;DR
  • 27:54 Exclusive
  • 30:28 A New Project

Key people

  • Sam Altman
  • Greg Brockman
  • Elon Musk
  • Microsoft

How we tell it

  • Every line a character speaks in their own voice is verbatim from the public record: texts, emails, tweets, speeches, blog posts, interviews, filings.
  • Dramatized staging is reconstructed from documented events; we invent no dialogue for any real person.
  • Contested accounts are told as contested and attributed to the side that claims them.
  • Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.
  • Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person.

Sources

  • OpenAI, "GPT-2: 1.5B release" (Nov 5, 2019).
  • Brown et al., "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," arXiv 2005.14165 (May 28, 2020).
  • OpenAI, "OpenAI API" (Jun 11, 2020; Brockman, Murati, Welinder).
  • Microsoft, Kevin Scott, "Microsoft teams up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3 language model" (Sep 22, 2020).
  • OpenAI, "Organizational update from OpenAI" (Dec 29, 2020).
  • The Guardian, Feb 14, 2019 (Clark).
  • Jared Kaplan et al., "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models," arXiv 2001.08361 (Jan 23, 2020).
  • Sam Altman, post on Twitter (Jul 19, 2020), as also quoted by MIT Technology Review (Jul 20, 2020).
  • The Guardian, "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?" (Sep 8, 2020), including its editor's note.

Credits

Written and produced by Will Sigmon for Will Sigmon Media. Narrator and character voices: AI-generated voices performing words from the public record.

Listen next

Next: Episode 7, "The Quiet Build."

Episode page: https://shows.willsigmon.media/role-models/episodes/s01e06

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims. The Role Models is produced by Will Sigmon Media with AI-generated voices. Quoted emails, posts and filings are read verbatim and attributed; where the parties disagree, both accounts are given, and a company's post written during a lawsuit is treated as advocacy by one side. Sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.

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