I'm gonna put forward the very view that gwern repeatedly argues against: "but... it's not understanding ." So far I see no evidence that this thing or anything else like it has any actual understanding, any model of the world. Indeed it can't as it possesses no sensory apparatus. It's not embodied. It doesn't experience anything. I'm not sure the OpenAI folks would argue with me, but it seems Gwern asserts that this…
What makes you confident that you aren't overestimating the importance that we "experience anything"
I maybe should have said sensed, not experienced, since experience also leads into much deeper philosophical discussions around the nature of mind and consciousness. I wasn't really going there, since I don't see anything in GPT-3 or any similar system that merits going there.
I also don't see any evidence that it is drawing any new conclusions or constructing any novel thoughts about anything. It's regurgitating similar results to pre-existing textual examples, re-arranging new ideas in new ways. If you don't think actual new ideas exist then this may be compelling, but if that's the case I have to ask: where did all the existing ideas come from then? Some creative mechanism must exist or nothing would exist, including this text.
The fact that the output often resembles pop Internet discourse says more about the mindlessness of "meme-think" than the GPT-3 model.
As for real world uses, social media spam and mass propaganda seems like the most obvious one. This thing seems like it would be a fantastic automated "meme warrior." Train it on a corpus of Qanon and set it to work "pilling" people.