ChatGPT

but like a lot of new tools, I do think there are potential ways people could involve this in their creative process, or that it could contribute to culture. for instance, there are voices who would probably never be able to write a memoir. ChatGPT (or something like it), with its learning abilities and unlimited patience, could perhaps enable someone with Down Syndrome write a memoir just by asking the person questions. or another possibility, I don't think ChatGPT is on a level that it would be capable of learning a new language just by interacting with somebody of that language, but when AI reaches that point, with so many unique languages and cultures and danger of disappearing completely, and not nearly enough linguists and ethnographers out there to save them all, something like this could be used to capture and preserve entire cultures, folklores, and histories before they disappear.

I love your ideas of using it to help someone with Down Syndrome or learning everything about a dying culture. I can't stop thinking about this thing for exactly those sorts of reasons.

Today it's essential as capable as an average person, but one that can do tasks that would take hours, days, or years in an instant. It doesn't get tired or impatient, even with my ridiculous questions on topics I know nothing about. I just read a post about someone who has severe social anxiety using it as a very patient tutor and helping him form questions to real people that he didn't have the confidence to try on his now.

I think it could learn a new language, though. Not in its current form -- it doesn't learn anything from chatting with people in its current form. But I think it could learn new languages just from chatting with someone in a language it doesn't know. It already has an abstracted understanding of language and it's apparently one of the best translators out there already. I bet it could pick up a new language. It learns them currently by just ingesting enough text in a new language, so chatting with people would be exactly that but slower.

Mmmm you might be right. I'm a programmer and I have trouble understanding how it works. I know at its it's a neural network, and the output is, like you say, basically a giant autocomplete machine, but there's something else going on at a higher level. The way you can refer back to what it generated and it understands, often deeply, exactly what you mean, is uncanny.

I have trouble reconciling "giant autocomplete machine" with the type of cognition it seems to have.

I've asked it to summarize the moral differences between the Bible and the Quran, generate and rank story ideas according to novelty, and add subtext to a story (it wasn't good at that last one, but it knew what I meant and it tried).

That being said, if it is truly just a giant autocomplete machine, and the dazzling cognition it seems to display is emergent from it's simplistic, autocompletion brain, what would a model an order of magnitude larger be capable of?

I think that is how they are now building their walking jumping robots,

at least that is how I would build them. One computer for the walking 

and moving and one for speaking and deciding where to go and how to miss sh*t.