OpenAI has developed an AI model that can summarize books of arbitrary length. A fine-tuned version of the research lab’s GPT-3, the model works by first summarizing small sections of a book and then summarizing those summaries into higher-level summaries, following a paradigm OpenAI calls “recursive task decomposition.” Summarizing book-length documents could be valuable in the enterprise, particularly for documentation-heavy industries like software development. A survey by SearchYourCloud found that workers take up to eight searches to find the right document, and McKinsey reports that employees spend 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week, on average — searching and gathering job-related information. “OpenAI believes that this is an effective ‘recipe’ that can be used to help humans supervise many other tasks,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “A scalable solution to the alignment problem needs to work on tasks that are difficult or time-consuming for humans to evaluate.”
https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/23/openai-unveils-model-that-can-summarize-books-of-any-length/
