And (from what I’ve seen) they get things wrong with extreme regularity, increasingly so as thing diverge from the training data. I wouldn’t say they’re a “stochastic parrot” but they don’t seem to be much better when things need to be correct… and again, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of their design, I don’t anticipate this technology (at least without some kind of augmented approach that can reason about the substance) overcoming that.

Keep in mind, you're talking about a rudimentary, introductory version of this, my argument is that we don't know what will happen when they've scaled up, we know for certain hallucinations become less frequent as the model size increases (see the statistics on gpt3 vs 4 on hallucinations), perhaps this only occurs because they haven't met a critical size yet? We don't know.

There's so much we don't know.

That’s missing the forest for the trees. Of course an AI isn’t going to go fishing. However, I should be able to assert some facts about fishing and it should be able to reason based on those assertions. e.g. a child can work off of facts presented about fishing, “fish are hard to catch in muddy water” -> “the water is muddy, does that impact my chances of a catching a bluegill?” -> “yes, it does, bluegill are fish, and fish don’t like muddy water”.

https://blog.research.google/2022/05/language-models-perform-reasoning-via.html

they do this already, albeit imperfectly, but again, this is like, a baby LLM.

and just to prove it:

https://chat.openai.com/share/54455afb-3eb8-4b7f-8fcc-e144a48b6798