A new general language machine learning model is pushing the boundaries of what AI can do.

Why it matters: OpenAI's GPT-3 system can reasonably make sense of and write human language. It's still a long way from genuine artificial intelligence, but it may be looked back on as the iPhone of AI, opening the door to countless commercial applications both benign and potentially dangerous.

Driving the news: After announcing GPT-3 in a paper in May, OpenAI recently began offering a select group of people access to the system's API to help the nonprofit explore the AI's full capabilities.

How it works: GPT-3 works the same way as predecessors like OpenAI's GPT-2 and Google's BERT analyzing huge swathes of the written internet and using that information to predict which words tend to follow after each other.

Details: As early testers begin posting about their experiments, what stands out is both GPT-3's range and the eerily human-like quality of some of its responses.

Yes, but: Give it more than a few paragraphs of text prompts and GPT-3 will quickly lose the thread of an argument sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results, as Kevin Lacker showed when he gave GPT-3 the Turing Test.

The big picture: Just because GPT-3 lacks real human intelligence doesn't mean that it lacks any intelligence at all, or that it can't be used to produce remarkable applications.

Of note: OpenAI has already begun partnering with commercial companies on GPT-3, including Replika and Reddit, though pricing is still undecided.

The catch: As OpenAI itself noted in the introductory paper, "internet-trained models have internet-scale biases." A model trained on the internet like GPT-3 will share the biases of the internet, including stereotypes around gender, race and religion.

The bottom line: Humans who assemble letters for a living aren't out of a job yet. But we may look back upon GPT-3 as the moment when AI began seeping into everything we do.

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Meet the AI that can write - Axios