I don't see how people can see stuff like that and say "oh, it's just a fancy Markov chain generator" or "it can't reason". Even if that stuff is nominally true, how can people not be totally blown away by this? Just a couple years ago I think people would have been amazed that it can have totally natural, grammatically correct conversations. Moreover, for nearly 3/4 of a century the scientific community has pretty much coalesced on only using the output to define intelligence (aka the Turing Test). While I understand that ChatGPT may not 100% be there yet, I see no reason to believe that all this interaction people are having with it won't be fed back into it to drastically improve its responses over time.
It's more like the scientific community has spent the last 50+ years criticizing the Turing Test. Passing as a human is a nice engineering goal, but there has been a lot of doubt of using input/output behavior as the only measure of intelligence. If you took a basic AI class before machine learning became popular, the chances are the class spent more time on the criticism than on the test itself.
EDIT
And here is something else that just struck me. The errors in the code are obvious the minute you run the program, particularly in the beginning when the population dies off after day 1. Chat GPT is apparently incapable of running the simulation to check if its code actually makes sense. It needs someone to tell it. Think about that for a second. Can you imagine a fellow programmer handing you a piece of code without bothering to try to run it first?
I can see Chat GPT as an advanced assistant who can save a programmer a LOT of time right now, but definitely nothing more than that.
Also, I see lots of comments downplaying the potential impacts of LLMs because they can hallucinate or they have errors, and though I agree with all these points, I also want to shout "Gang, we're having a fully natural, back-and-forth conversation, with a computer. It speaks English and French and TypeScript!" This is stuff that seemed fully planted in the realm of science fiction only a decade or so ago. For example, I'm not sure I've ever seen ChatGPT make a grammatical mistake, or even generate code that can't compile (though I have seen ChatGPT "crap out" if the program it's writing gets too long).
I think I'm naturally a pretty skeptical person when it comes to tech hype, to the point of usually being over-conservative about potential impacts (I drastically underestimated the impact mobile would have on society, for example). But with ChatGPT, I feel like I need to take breaks just from the constant mind-blowing nature of it.
