Frankly, I don't know what to make of it. Either it has access to files or it is lying about having such access (and then later pretends it has access anyway). At least the contents and filenames look somewhat plausible for such a project, but it could just as well spin this from whole cloth. The fact that you can't really tell is interesting by itself (and I'm sure someone from openai would be able to resolve this one way or another).

These language models confidently assert falsehoods all the time. They were trained on the internet, so they don't have a lot of examples of people humbly acknowledging they don't know an answer.

It's been weird to me how many people in this forum sincerely seem to believe that this is more than a language model. It's a really good language model, and has the potential to be useful for a lot of things, but it's not a repository of facts*.

* EDIT: It has a lot of facts embedded but should never be trusted to reliably tell the truth. It is first and foremost a model of human language, and lies are expressed in language, too.

I do believe it is a language model, and not a repository of pure fact, but it remembers context, because it is designed for conversation. It is augmented to remember things that you have talked about, thus, your current talking points/interests.

For example: you talk about philosophers. Then you refer to them as "they". From then on, it will remember the context whenever you refer to philosophers as "they". When pressed, it will repeat your mantra of "I am just a language model, I can't possibly remember context" while it clearly does, either by design or emergence.

That's only because you don't give it just a single prompt like you would with a human during conversation. When you add a new sentence, what you're actually doing is giving it the whole history of your conversation with your new sentence appended at the end, so it always analyzes the whole before returning a new answer. It doesn't remember context between prompts, it's only the UI that makes you think it does.

It's good to think about these models as eager cosplayers of any role you set up in your prompt. In this case, it sees its own past replies, so it cosplays an AI that gave these answers before. You could edit its past replies and override its "personality" this way.

Oh okay, I suppose re-evaluating the entire conversation history for every response would make it stateless.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861775

Basically it's a contextual trick that exploits our pattern recognition pareidolia, like faces in clouds or horoscopes or cold reads.

It's not its code. It "cold read" what you wanted from the questioning itself.

Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, then emphasizing and reinforcing chance connections and quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Forer effect and due to confirmation biases within people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

It’s “lying” in the same sense that stable diffusion draws an astronaut riding a unicorn.