Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
I&#x27;ve spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough.<p>It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call &#x27;understanding&#x27;.<p>I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it&#x27;s trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It&#x27;s easy to think it&#x27;s avoiding questions because it can&#x27;t answer them. But often if you reframe the question you realize it is able to answer.<p>I also think there&#x27;s an art to formulating your query. It&#x27;s easy to get a bad response because your question is interpreted too literally, or didn&#x27;t really say what you meant. Reframing can often get much better results.<p>It also appears bad at numbers&#x2F;counting.<p>I think these are causing many people to underestimate it.<p>It&#x27;s also easy to overestimate it sometimes - it often generates plausible but not quite right answers. You&#x27;ve got to read quite closely to make sure it&#x27;s actually right.<p>But it&#x27;s very good at a lot of things. Code synthesis. Summarization, Reformulation, explanation, information retrieval.<p>I think it&#x27;s going to change whole industries.<p>It&#x27;s also getting really hard to definitively say &quot;well, AI definitely can&#x27;t do X&quot;. X is getting small.<p>I think this is a watershed moment and people should be thinking hard about the implications.<p>This sample shocked me: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;fergal_reid&#x2F;status&#x2F;1598102596065300486" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;fergal_reid&#x2F;status&#x2F;15981025960653...</a><p>I got it to write a poem, altered it step by step so that&#x27;s clearly not something it will have seen before, and then asked it questions.<p>The bit where it explains why chocolate frogs mightn&#x27;t make Ron from Harry Potter sick because of some wierd fact in that world, shocked me, because it&#x27;s a really good retrieval of a very deep fact, relevant to a clearly out of sample input, and a good synthesis of that fact with reality.<p>It&#x27;s amazing.