Unless the difference in training of GPT-3 and ChatGPT has led to an improvement in the veracity of the replies given, I think the differences in their training

Unless the difference in training of GPT-3 and ChatGPT has led to an improvement in the veracity of the replies given, I think the differences in their training are moot in regard to the question of what it will take to get substantially true responses from them. For the reasons I gave in my previous post, I don't regard progress in appearing plausible as necessarily progress towards being able to tell truth from falsehoods. To be clear, I am not claiming that a symbolic approach would be better. Pointing out the shortcomings of current methods does not provide evidence that symbolic approaches will succeed (or vice-versa, for that matter.) This leaves code. On reading your statement about starting with it, it suddenly occurred to me that code is a constrained environment compared to the whole of human discourse. It is obvious, I think, that programming languages are extremely limited in what they can express in comparison to human languages, but perhaps less obviously (at least to me), it seems to follow that what humans can say about programs is also constrained (again, in comparison to human discourse in general - but not nearly as constrained as what can be said in the programming languages themselves.) This leads me to agree with you in this respect (at least tentatively), and here's why: Currently, on Earth, we have one species whose individuals have a well-developed sense of themselves as agents in that world, a similarly well-developed theory of mind about others, and are adroit language users. A few other species have some of these abilities to a limited extent, but not nearly so well developed that they can fully make use of them. As an evolutionist, I suppose that some of our ancestor and related species had intermediate levels of these capabilities, and if we can make AIs that occupy that space we would be making progress. In this view, attempting to match or surpass human performance in language use and understanding the world is about as difficult a target as we could have. As an intermediate target, the domain of program code and the things people say about it has some things going for it: not only is it more constrained (as argued above), but quite a lot has been written about it and is available for training. It is also (arguably) less likely than human language in general to contain statements intended to influence opinions without regard to the truth.