It’s incapable of thinking. But what it’s surprisingly good at is symbolic reasoning similar to human common sense. Most people forget that there is no memory

It’s incapable of thinking. But what it’s surprisingly good at is symbolic reasoning similar to human common sense. Most people forget that there is no memory or thought independent of whatever the output it generates. But when you ask it to follow a chain of thought and generate it in the output, the eventual conclusions it lands on is scarily human. People asking ChatGPT for word counts and sighing at how wrong it is. Yeah of course, it has no counter variables to hold numbers and increment them. It has no memory. But when you ask it to generate a numbered list of all the words in a passage and then output the word count, it gets it right every time. Because you basically gave it a memory by encoding the counter in the generated output.