> It truly seems like there is some reasoning happening. I don't understand how this can be the output of a generative LLM
Right - this seeming "cognition" is exactly what's so spooky about the whole thing.
Here's what spooked me out from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35167685 - specifically how it determines the divide-by-zero error in this code: https://whatdoesthiscodedo.com/g/6a8f359
...which demonstrates GPT as being capable of at-least C++ "constexpr"-style compile-time computation, which shouldn't even be possible if one presumes GPT is "just" a giant database storing only multidimensional word similarity scores and sequence distribution from text inference.
> a generative LLM
I definitely wanted to believe that GPT was "just predicting the next word" - it was somewhat comforting to think of GPT as still being far from being-human or behaving like a real brain does - but that explanation never sat well with me: it was too simplistic and dismissive, and didn't explain the behaviour I was witnessing in GPT.
...so after having read Wolfram's (surprisingly accessible) article on GPT ( https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-... ) it made a lot of things "click" in my head - and enabled me to start to understand why and how GPT is capable of... the surprising things it does; but it also leads me to believe we're (warning: incoming cliche) barely scratching the surface of what we can do: right-away I do believe we're almost at the point where we could simply ask GPT how to adapt it into some kind of early AGI - and we've all heard of what's supposed to follow next... and it really is quite unsettling.