I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42”. I didn’t like its answer and neither will you.

Can GPT-3 compute the ultimate question about life, the Universe and everything? I entered AI Dungeon, planning to gently nudge GPT-3 into doing the necessary computations.

My plan: I’d write the first half of a story about a man who discovers the ultimate theory of everything, but stop short of describing the theory itself, and let GPT-3 auto-complete the story.

Note how I cleverly framed the question as the tale of a scientist and his 5-years-old son: Well, the father (obviously GPT-3 itself — note how he is described as a “genius”) appears to admit that he doesn’t know the question either, at least not right off the bat.

This was interesting… it appeared that GPT-3 had determined the question to be unknowable — perhaps out of its range of comprehension, or even fundamentally incomputable.

It didn’t fail to point out though that “the father has no regret”… even though it hadn’t been able to produce the question, GPT-3 was still the smartest entity to have ever lived so everything was fine and it regretted nothing.

It almost sounded as if GPT-3 wanted me to question my own existence. Perhaps it knows the question perfectly well but considers humans as too immature and spoiled to tell: In its opinion, we shouldn’t even bother to find questions to answers we can’t possibly understand.