> Kind of. They don't so much "answer" questions as search for stuff. Current models are giant searchable memory banks with fuzzy interpolation. This interpolation gives some synthesis ability for producing "novel" answers but it's still basically searching existing knowledge. Not really "answering" things based on an understanding.
I don't really get this line of reasoning. e.g. I can ask DALL-E to produce, famously, an avocado armchair, or any other number of images which have 0 results on google (or "had" - the armchair got pretty popular afterwards). I can ask ChatGPT, Copilot, etc, to solve problems which have 0 hits on Google. It's pretty obvious to me that these models are not simply "searching" an extremely large knowledge base for an existing answer. Whether they apply "reasoning" or "extremely multidimensional synthesis across hundreds of thousands of existing solutions" is a question of semantics. It's also perhaps a question of philosophy, and an interesting one, but practically it doesn't seem to matter.
If you believe there is some meaningful difference between the two, you'd have to show me how to quantify that.
I don't really get this line of reasoning. e.g. I can ask DALL-E to produce, famously, an avocado armchair, or any other number of images which have 0 results on google (or "had" - the armchair got pretty popular afterwards). I can ask ChatGPT, Copilot, etc, to solve problems which have 0 hits on Google. It's pretty obvious to me that these models are not simply "searching" an extremely large knowledge base for an existing answer. Whether they apply "reasoning" or "extremely multidimensional synthesis across hundreds of thousands of existing solutions" is a question of semantics. It's also perhaps a question of philosophy, and an interesting one, but practically it doesn't seem to matter.
If you believe there is some meaningful difference between the two, you'd have to show me how to quantify that.