>This is a straw argument.
People say that it does not understand anything, that it just predicts text as though it does.
However, I believe they're mistaken. I find that it clearly understands things.
What do you think? Do you think it understands you when you speak to it? Can it do problem solving or original thought in your opinion? My own anwer is: "100% it understands me, and 100% yes it can do problem solving and original thought - maybe not world class scientist level but to an impressive extent."
Clearly it just has a few thinking "moments", it can't spend hours extensively tackling a problem the way a human can, and it doesn't have a memory, nor can plan nor execute large projects by itself or anything like that.
But it can, as you say, do "limited verbal reasoning", and that is incredibly impressive.
"Does this really answer the question"
Or, describe how the information you provided will reach the goal in a possible, practical way.
It does understand basics, like me, you, others. And it can handle logic expressions to a degree I find notable.
OpenAI has hardcoded (or heavily overfit) several special-purpose functions into their ChatGPT systems. In the past few months, they've integrated other special-purpose models, so their tools can do more than just predictive text (e.g. image recognition).
GPT can do limited reasoning, whatever else can do
> We are truly living in the golden age of statistical prediction that does not involve any degree of thinking, analysis, or understanding.
This is a straw argument. I can't speak for anyone else, but my criticisms are mainly of people seeing some thinking-like, analysis-like or understanding-like behaviour, and assuming that it is human-like thinking, analysis or understanding, while ignoring other hypotheses (some of which make successful advance predictions in a way the “it's doing what humans do!” models don't).
I will note: the people being the most loudly exuberant about ChatGPT's vast intelligence seem to view it as a tool. If I were faced with an opaque box, inside which was a being capable of general-purpose problem solving, conversation, and original thought, my first reaction would not be “I can use this for my own ends”. I am glad that I have seen nothing to convince me that ChatGPT is such a being, and I have theoretical arguments that ChatGPT probably won't ever be such a being, but if you genuinely think this technology has the potential to produce such a being, you have an ethical responsibility.