Clearly it doesn't need to have seen the exact input before because you can ask GPT-4 to add together two 6 digit numbers and it will get it right. More impres

Clearly it doesn't need to have seen the exact input before because you can ask GPT-4 to add together two 6 digit numbers and it will get it right. More impressively, if you generate a random small neural network and then put some samples in the prompt it can do a surprisingly good job of predicting the result of putting other inputs into the network. Presumably doing something that looks a bit like gradient decent, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.07677.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.07677.pdf Solely in order to predict the next token, LLMs are learning an incredibly sophisticed model of both computation and the outside world.