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Your phrasing almost makes it sound like you're sharing a clear example of it analyzing and completing a complex task correctly, while perfectly understanding what it's doing.OpenAI has hardcoded (or heavily overfit) several special-purpose functions into their ChatGPT systems. In the past few months, they've integrated other special-purpose models, so their tools can do more than just predictive text (e.g. image recognition).
GPT can do limited verbal reasoning, whatever else can do image recognition, but that does not mean the combined system can do visual reasoning. There's no mechanism by which it would (unless you specifically create one, but that's not trivial and doesn't generalise).
> Who knew that to get results that look like it knows what it's doing, it's enough to predict what could make someone say that!
Everyone. Some call it “specification gaming” or “reward hacking”, and we've known about it for a long time. It's a really obvious concept if you have a good mental model of reinforcement learning. https://doi.org/10.1162%2Fartl_a_00319 is a fun example.
> We are truly living in the golden age of statistical prediction that does not involve any degree of thinking, analysis, or understanding.
This is a straw argument. I can't speak for anyone else, but my criticisms are mainly of people seeing some thinking-like, analysis-like or understanding-like behaviour, and assuming that it is human-like thinking, analysis or understanding, while ignoring other hypotheses (some of which make successful advance predictions in a way the “it's doing what humans do!” models don't).
I will note: the people being the most loudly exuberant about ChatGPT's vast intelligence seem to view it as a tool. If I were faced with an opaque box, inside which was a being capable of general-purpose problem solving, conversation, and original thought, my first reaction would not be “I can use this for my own ends”. I am glad that I have seen nothing to convince me that ChatGPT is such a being, and I have theoretical arguments that ChatGPT probably won't ever be such a being, but if you genuinely think this technology has the potential to produce such a being, you have an ethical responsibility.