Eight things to know about large language models [pdf]
I have a little weather station mounted outside my house, and there is a small linux machine (Raspberry Pi) logging the weather data into an SQLite database.   I have almost two years of data now, so I asked GPT-4 to write a Python program that would query the database, calculate the average temperature for each day, fit a sine wave to those data points, find the first minimum of the sine wave and use that to calculate what day of the year should be coldest on average, then plot everything.  It did that easily. But the big surprise was this: just for fun, I told GPT-4 that one of the quantities it had calculated could be used to estimate the orbital period of the Earth, and I asked it which quantity it was. It correctly answered that the reciprocal of the frequency of the fitted sine wave is an estimate of the Earth&#x27;s orbital period.   All I had told it to do was pull out the temperature data for each day, and fit a sine wave.   It <i>knew</i> that the reciprocal of the frequency was the Earth&#x27;s orbital period, without me mentioning anything at all about the Earth when I was prompting it to write the program.  It had calculated dozens of variable values on its way to producing the plots, and it knew the right one to pick, and it knew the answer was its reciprocal.<p>I thought that perhaps the program just recognized that the only value that could be used to calculate <i>any</i> period was that frequency, and perhaps the model didn&#x27;t really know anything about the Earth motion through its orbit affecting the average temperature, so I asked:<p>&quot;Can any of the values be used to estimate the Moon&#x27;s orbital period?&quot;<p>and it replied:<p>&quot;No, the code and the data used in this program are not suitable for estimating the Moon&#x27;s orbital period. The temperature data being analyzed is influenced by the Earth&#x27;s rotation around the Sun and other factors like weather patterns, but it doesn&#x27;t directly correlate with the Moon&#x27;s orbital period.&quot;