I am not a fan of this trend of "Language Models Are X" in recent work particularly out of OpenAI. I think it's a rhetorical sleight of hand which hurts the discourse.
Like, the exact same paper could have instead been titled "Few-Shot Learning with a Large-Scale Language Model" or similar. But instead there seems to be this extremely strong desire to see certain ineffable qualities in neural networks. Like, it's a language model. It does language modeling. Turns out you can use it for few-shot learning and do amazingly well. Beyond that, what does it mean to say it "is" a few-shot learner?
On one hand, it's literally the same claim in a strict sense. On the other hand, it implies something much broader and more sweeping, that language modeling / unsupervised learning as a task over long contexts inherently implies meta-learning ability — which is a statement that is very difficult to properly formulate, let alone back up. But that's the argument that I feel is being slipped under the table by these titles. (And indeed it's very close to what they suggest in the text, though with no more than a wave of the hands.)
Don't get me wrong: their intuition is reasonable, it's super cool that they got this to work, and the results are very impressive on lots of tasks (though there are clear gaps). But as a VERY publicly watched lab, they have a serious duty (which I think they're neglecting) to frame their results more carefully. In particular, there's a sort of religion that if you train a big enough model on big enough data with self-supervision, it will somehow become AGI and/or learn to solve arbitrary problems. Claims like "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" are clearly designed to fit into that worldview, even though the research doesn't point at it any more than a more conservative interpretation like "Lots of NLP Tasks are Learned in the Course of Language Modeling and can be Queried by Example." They touch on this limitation in their discussion section but I guess flashy titles are more important. I wish they would use their status to set a better example.
