Right, I totally agree that there are many cases where it doesn’t really get what it’s saying, but my point is that failure to understand many basic concepts (e

Right, I totally agree that there are many cases where it doesn’t really get what it’s saying, but my point is that failure to understand many basic concepts (even concepts which would be surprising for a human to misunderstand) doesn’t imply an inability to understand in general. It only implies that the model has certain deficits. Imagine if we encountered an alien species for whom quantum mechanics was perfectly natural and intuitive. Those aliens ask me a bunch of basic QM questions. I’m more familiar with QM than the average layman, but the best I can do is try to shove their questions into the metaphors I know, and with the aid of the internet, I could do a little bit of the math. Most of what I answer will be confused. The aliens are going to come away with the correct impression that I don’t really understand QM. And because QM is so natural to them, they may also think that this is an indictment of my reasoning skills overall. But the reality is just that they’re testing me on questions for which my mental model is very shoddy. I’m not saying that the situation is analogous for ChatGPT. I’m just saying that this question can’t be answered by collecting up examples of where the model does poorly. For what it’s worth, out of four trials, the model only once gave any consideration beyond the word “typically” to the idea that a baby might be older than a teenager. In that case, it noted “However, it's important to note that age is a relative concept and can vary based on cultural and individual perspectives.” Honestly, I suspect that’s a result of its tuning and prompting to be culturally sensitive. In general, I’ve noticed that ChatGPT is constantly on the lookout for cases where its beliefs may not be culturally universal.