Predicting the next token perfectly would make a chatbot an omniscient god, as it could tell you things like the lottery numbers from next week. Chatbots "just"

Predicting the next token perfectly would make a chatbot an omniscient god, as it could tell you things like the lottery numbers from next week. Chatbots "just" being a token predictors does not limit their power or intelligence in any way. It however also doesn't tell you how good they are at their job. If you want to test how good a chatbot is at predicting tokens, well, you just have to test it. You can throw a Winograd schema challenge at it, or let it take part in code competition or exams, let it solve puzzles and all that. Quick simple test will for example show you that ChatGPT isn't any good at calculating, as the answers will just be wrong. As for awareness, we know what ChatGPT is aware of: Its 4000 token history and whatever information it learned from the training data. That's the grand total of its existence, it doesn't get any other input, it doesn't perceive time, it doesn't learn, that history is all there is to it. And we can call that awareness as ChatGPT is able to perform correct prediction based on that token history. For consciousness there are still a lot of basic parts missing, such as the perception of time, senses to act with some external world, the ability to think for itself without getting explicitly prompted and all that.