GPT-3 stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3" the successor to GPT-2. An autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Created by OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research laboratory. Introduced on May 2020.

The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it is difficult to distinguish from that written by a human. Which has both benefits and risks.
GPT-3 can "generate news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans," The researchers described in detail in their May 28, 2020 paper, the potential "harmful effects of GPT-3" which include "misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting".
As GPT-3 was trained on hundreds of billions of words it is capable of coding in CSS, JSX, Python, among others.

On June 11, 2020, OpenAI announced that users could request access to its user-friendly GPT-3 API—a "machine learning toolset"—to help OpenAI "explore the strengths and limits" of this new technology and on September 22, 2020 Microsoft announced that it had licensed "exclusive" use of GPT-3, however others can still use the public API to receive output, but only Microsoft has control of the source code.

According to one user, who had access to a private early release of the OpenAI GPT-3 API, GPT-3 was "eerily good" at writing "amazingly coherent text" with only a few simple prompts.

A Farhad Manjoo in his review in The New York Times, said that GPT-3—which can generate computer code and poetry, as well as prose—is not just "amazing", "spooky", and "humbling", but also "more than a little terrifying".

An article in the MIT Technology Review, cowritten by Deep Learning critic Gary Marcus, stated that GPT-3's "comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says." According to the authors, GPT-3 models relationships between words without having an understanding of the meaning behind each word.

Jerome Pesenti, head of the Facebook A.I. lab, said GPT-3 is "unsafe," pointing to the sexist, racist and other biased and negative language generated by the system when it was asked to discuss Jews, women, Blacks, and the Holocaust.

David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, described GPT-3 as "one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced."

Some of the current applications of this technology includes:
•Being used as an AI Writer by Andrew Mayne, which allows people to talk with historical figures via email.
•Used by Jason Rohrer in a retro-themed chatbot project named "Project December", which is accessible online and allows users to converse with several AIs using GPT-3 technology.
•Used in AI Dungeon, which generates text-based adventure games.
Among others.

I didn't expect ChatGPT to catch on this quick