That it can interpret pseudocode has been discovered a while ago. It can even do functions and recursion. But it's not good at arithmetic on numbers, once they get large enough.

What's even more interesting is that you can "teach" it languages, either by explaining what something does, or by providing examples. For example, if you feed it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck#Commands, it can handle simple Brainfuck programs (but gets confused esp. by nested loops).

Huh, you’re right: https://mayt.substack.com/p/gpt-3-can-run-code

Thanks!

I think there's a lot still to discover. E.g. recently I found out that it can do this (although getting the table aligned took a couple of refreshes):

   Use pseudographics to render the following HTML:

   <table border="1">
   <tr><th>Name</th><th>Value</th></tr>
   <tr><td rowspan="2">Foo</td><td>123</td></tr>
   <tr><td>456</td></tr>
   <tr><td>Bar</td><td>789</td></tr>
   </table>

   +-------+-------+
   | Name  | Value |
   +-------+-------+
   | Foo   | 123   |
   |       | 456   |
   +-------+-------+
   | Bar   | 789   |
   +-------+-------+

So I guess we could say that GPT-3 also has some kind of simple HTML layout engine! I was particularly impressed that it got rowspan right.

I guess the next step would be to combine HTML with JS and see if GPT-3 has a mutable DOM...

I discovered a while ago that you can ask GPT-3 for the output of even extremely obfuscated javascript code and it will produce the correct results most of the time.