I remember reading this back in 2019. It was the first article that really made me pay attention to GPT. The bits about making acronyms and poor counting as second-order behaviors really jumped out at me at the time.

It's remarkable how well the article has aged - all the bits about "wow, look, it can kinda sorta try to summarize an article if you prompt it the right way" obviously all became insanely more relevant with GPT3 and GPT4. Same with the bits about translation and how it seemed like it could sorta write a poem.

Still a good read, and scary that it was written only 4 years ago.