OpenAI Opens GPT-3 for Everyone

How to get in and what to expect

Alberto Romero
Towards Data Science
5 min readNov 19, 2021

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Photo by Roselynne on Shutterstock

A change that makes the company a bit more deserving of its name.

When OpenAI announced GPT-3 in May 2020 we were already awaiting the news. The model promised to meet the high expectations set by its older brother in 2019. The year before, OpenAI had published the source code of GPT-2 and it was a complete success for them both in terms of hype and results. From AI dungeon, an adventure video game with “infinite possibilities,” to headlines in every tech news outlet.

And GPT-3 would be bigger, more versatile, and even qualitatively stronger.

OpenAI released GPT-3 in June 2020, but in contrast to GPT-2 — and to the deception of most —, they decided to set up a private API to filter who could use the system. With 175 billion parameters, it was the largest neural network at the time, capturing the attention of mass media, researchers, and AI businesses alike. People had to join a waitlist and patiently expect OpenAI to get back to them (many tried but almost no one got access). It was so infamously difficult to enter that people published posts explaining how they did it.

OpenAI seemed to be particularly worried about safety. Controlling who could access the model allowed the company to limit the potential harm. Yet, despite their…

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