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Pathways Language Model (PaLM) Is No Joke
Google recently introduced the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), a 540-billion parameter, dense decoder-only Transformer model trained with the Pathways system, which enabled them to efficiently train a single model across multiple TPU v4 Pods. They evaluated PaLM on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks, and found that it achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance across most tasks, by significant margins in many cases.
Best of all, it's an artificial intelligence that can explain jokes. Seriously.
(Explaining a joke)
Consider Rupert the robotic comedian from The Jester (1951) by William Tenn. It was also able to understand jokes - even it's own!
The robot, standing perfectly immobile, was clacking wildly, grinding his gears and pinging his wires as if he were coming apart."That's another bug the techs didn't have time to clean up. Comes from the meson filter. Near as we can figure out it's what they call an aftereffect of his capacity to distinguish between gags that are partly funny and gags that are very funny. Electronic differentiation of the grotesque, as it says in the specifications - in man, a sense of humor. 'Course in a robot, it only means there's a kink in the exhaust."
('The Jester' by William Tenn)
Compare to Mycroft Holmes, the computer humorist from Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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