We are going to be playing with OpenAI's GPT-3, a massive language model trained on hundreds of millions of documents crawled from the Internet. GPT-3 is trained on the mundane task of predicting what the next character is likely to be in a sentence. It can generate random text and complete stories in a remarkably human way. It can create bedtime stories, write essays, learn the meaning of made-up concepts, even solve basic mathematics problems.

We're also going to play with DALL-E 2, a relatively new AI method that can generate photorealistic images as well as abstract illustrations or art, based on text prompts. Unlike previous methods, DALL-E 2 has a remarkable ability to "imagine" things that one would never see in the wild: a grizzly bear trying on shirts at H&M.

AI capabilities develop at amazing speed. New models and breakthroughs in performance are announced almost on a monthly basis. If you're just starting university now, who knows what this technology will look like by the time you graduate. We will also talk a bit about AI safety, alignment and ethics. The field of AI safety looks at ways things can go seriously wrong as this technology gets more powerful. AI alignment tries to develop techniques and processes to ensure AI it's used for more good than bad and that it follows instructions in ways we intended it to. Meanwhile, AI Ethics is broadly concerned with ensuring that (dumb) AI that is already deployed everywhere can be trusted to effect society in a fair way and with respect to people's privacy.