AI pause, Chuck Jones style: Whoops! [aka AI Winter, we've been there before]

Back in August of 2020 I issued a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. On the first page, after the cover, but before the abstract and table of contents, I said this:

GPT-3 is a significant achievement.

But I fear the community that has created it may, like other communities have done before – machine translation in the mid-1960s, symbolic computing in the mid-1980s, triumphantly walk over the edge of a cliff and find itself standing proudly in mid-air.

This is not necessary and certainly ...