Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

My "Wow!" moment came from a similar experiment. I asked ChatGPT to create a fictional assembly language, list and explain the opcodes (apologies if I'm using incorrect terminology. I'm not a low level developer) , then write a program and explain what the program does. It wasn't perfect , and used some opcodes it didn't mention previously, but the example program and explanation were coherent.

I then wrote my own simple program in the fictional assembly language and asked ChatGPT to evaluate it. Here are the results:

  tell me the number that is in R3 after this "Flux Assembly" program:

  MOV 7, R1
  MOV 2, R2
  ADD R1, R2, R3

  The number that is in R3 after this "Flux Assembly" program is 9. The program 
  first uses the MOV op code to move the value of 7 into the register R1, and 
  the value of 2 into the register R2. It then uses the ADD op code to add the 
  values of R1 and R2 and store the result in R3. Since 7 + 2 = 9, the value 
  that is stored in R3 is 9.

Pretty interesting, but most assembly languages are similar enough. How about a really wacky fictional assembly language? ChatGPT then gave me "Zany Assembly" which included the following op code:

  SPAZZ: This opcode causes the processor to randomly select and execute one of 
  the next five instructions in the program. It has no operands and the syntax 
  is simply "SPAZZ."   

I then tried to "run" a simple program:

  what are the the contents of R1 after this Zany Assembly program is run?

  SPAZZ
  MOV 33, R1
  MOV 8989, R1
  MOV 173, R1
  MOV 20, R1
  MOV 8, R1

  The contents of R1 after this Zany Assembly program is run are unpredictable. 
  The program uses the SPAZZ op code at the beginning, which causes the 
  processor to randomly select and execute one of the next five instructions in 
  the program. This means that the contents of R1 after the program is run could 
  be any of the values that are moved into it by the MOV op codes. It could be 
  33, 8989, 173, 20, or 8, depending on which instruction is selected and 
  executed by the SPAZZ op code.

I was impressed (and this was after it unsurprisingly failed at Conway's game of life!)

Prompts and responses for the curious: https://pastebin.com/aiQZx9pQ

I've been following this thread with Meta's recent BlenderBot 3 [1] as well, and also just tested ChatGPT.

As a precursory statement, I do not mean this in any sort of a sci-fi sense, but more of a very literal... intellectual & philosophical curiosity, kind of amazed, slightly perplexed. I apologize if I come across as naive here!

Something I can't get out of my mind - what truly is this thing/what does it represent? I know it's a language model.. but it's more than just a language model.. it gets close to crossing that barrier of the Turing test [2], except that we know it is not actually sentient/intelligent and the Turing test itself is controversial. This bot/language model appears to have protections in place to try to protect me as the user from thinking that it is a human/sentient, in fact. Almost like, we're afraid of that possibility.

What I mean, in the sense of... this could not exist and make sense without human input. Is this level of model only really possible when you have such an enormous set of essentially a huge population of humans as an input (thus why companies collect so much data)? I mean, encoded in this model is some component of human intelligence coming from language.

I mean, even if you didn't need all that data, and you were purely a language based model based on the rules of human grammar - even then, still, the grammar is human language. This thing cannot exist without humans, so it is somehow derived from humanity, but this is not human.

Is this purely a model/algorithm/machine derived from humanity? It seems to be more than that based on this post (which seems to be capable of simulating a running virtual machine inside ChatGPT). Is this potentially defined as an automation of human text/language interaction?

There is a concept (I'm sharing a factual link, but I intend to be non-denominational/neutral/respectful to anyone's religion here) of "God's Algorithm"[3]. Setting aside religious differences, I used to think of an analogous "God's database", which isn't a thing apparently. I'm imagining the superset of data of everything. The algorithm is the encoded functional model of the data. If you somehow had this superset and then compressed it down into a model, it would be a thing that could not exist without both the full data, the processing to evaluate and compress it, the logic for how to compress it and express it, and the system for interacting with that model, and probably a lot of other things.

I think, from a philosophical perspective, this is more than just a language model - because it contains so much human input - even though functionally, according to the developers, it is simply a language model. But I feel deeply there is something more to what it is and I am struggling to find the right description/definition. If it is not AI because it is a model derived from captured human intelligence/text/language data (if intelligence that has meaning to humans is derived from humans), then what is it?

Do we just say, "a very advanced language model"? This, DALL-E, StableDiffusion, etc. etc. - it does feel like there's been a fundamental shift. We may not be at the singularity [4] yet.. but where are we exactly yet? The doorstep?

>>> What do you know about the singularity?

> The singularity is a hypothetical future event in which artificial intelligence and other technologies advance to the point where they fundamentally alter the course of human history. Some people believe that the singularity will be a positive turning point for humanity, while others are more skeptical. Some believe that it could even lead to the extinction of humanity as we know it. At this time, it is not clear exactly when or if the singularity will occur.

>>> Is the existence of advanced language AI model similar to the one I am interacting with proof that we are near to the occurrence of the singularity?

> Not necessarily. The development of advanced language AI models is certainly a significant achievement, but it does not necessarily mean that the singularity is imminent. The singularity is a hypothetical event, and there is no consensus on what exactly it would entail or when it might occur. While some people believe that the singularity is fast approaching, others are more skeptical. Ultimately, only time will tell if the singularity is truly on the horizon.

>>> Describe to me in precise scientific terms, what I am interacting with?

> You are interacting with a large language model trained by OpenAI. This means that the model has been trained on a massive amount of text data and is able to generate human-like responses to a wide range of inputs. While the model is able to generate responses that are similar to those of a human, it is important to remember that it is not actually capable of understanding or comprehending the input in the same way that a human would. It is simply generating text based on its training and the patterns it has identified in the data.

[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2022/08/blenderbot-ai-chatbot-impr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_algorithm

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

I don't know if that's a great way to judge its creativity—it was trained on an enormous dataset, so it would be hard to determine if something was actually new or cobbled together from bits and pieces it found elsewhere.