What has been fascinating to watch over the weekend is how those refinements have led to an explosion of interest in OpenAI’s capabilities and a burgeoning awareness of AI’s impending impact on society, despite the fact that the underlying model is the two-year old GPT-3. Those assignments - by virtue of being on the Internet - are probably some of the grist of the GPT-3 language model that undergirds ChatGPT ChatGPT applies a layer of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to create a new model that is presented in an intuitive chat interface with some degree of memory (which is achieved by resending previous chat interactions along with the new prompt). It was dumb luck that my first ChatGPT query ended up being something the service got wrong, but you can see how it might have happened: Hobbes and Locke are almost always mentioned together, so Locke’s articulation of the importance of the separation of powers is likely adjacent to mentions of Hobbes and Leviathan in the homework assignments you can find scattered across the Internet. Constitution, adopted an evolved proposal from Charles Montesquieu that added a judicial branch as a check on the other two.

Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy - the natural state of human affairs - was to vest absolute power in a monarch checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.

This is a confident answer, complete with supporting evidence and a citation to Hobbes work, and it is completely wrong. I put the question to ChatGPT, which had just been announced by OpenAI a few hours earlier: It happened to be Wednesday night when my daughter, in the midst of preparing for “The Trial of Napoleon” for her European history class, asked for help in her role as Thomas Hobbes, witness for the defense.

Reading for homework