>“That language models can do these sort of things was never discussed in any literature that I’m aware of," I had previously the expectation that unpredictable emergent behavior would exist in any sufficiently complex system? Based on layman's readings in chaos and complexity theory.
Same here. I don't think it's surprising, but depending on where you say it, you'll find people insisting that this can't be possible. I think a lot of our widely held cultural beliefs on this front have been informed by academic philosophy from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In particular, I would go do far as to say that Hubert Dreyfus, author of the book "What computers can't do" and frequent friendly adversary of Daniel…
One thing that LLMs have made me realize is just how ungrounded a lot of mainstream academic philosophy was in the 70s and 80s. For example, so much of Derrida's work centered around the impossibility of truly communicating shared meaning between individuals through language. The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity/technology that is not even human pretty much destroys so much of Derrida's oeuvre as false and delusionally solipsistic, basically just a silly game. He had his critics who argued the same thing, especially analytical philosophers, but they never had as much purchase as he did in the academy.