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I've heard worse from undergraduates in office hours and other people who are just zoned out, including myself, and this latest idea that surely True Intelligence must be hiding in the performance gap between a slightly dull/intoxicated/sleepy human and a well-educated human at the top of their game strikes me as textbook god-of-the-gaps reasoning. At this point I'm not particularly impressed by any statement of the form "all the things AI does are easy and it won't do this hard thing it can't currently do anytime soon", unless the prediction of what exactly the easy and hard thing are was registered like 5 years ago.
ChatGPT's training wasn't based on the pronunciations and its tokenizer does not reflect the alphabetic spelling of words; from the point of view of its representation, the question is almost comparable to what it would be like for you to have to come up with words whose closest Chinese translation's first syllable is in fourth tone. The real problem here is that ChatGPT has not (yet?) been trained to understand what it doesn't know (as I would guess that its training set does not contain an appropriate set of examples of intellectual humility in Q&A), and instead has a general tendency to just confidently answer even if it has to talk out of its ass. This, too, is all too common in humans.
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