I personally don't think human consciousness or thought is very "special" or "unique", and probably a lot of animals and complex systems have the same properties that lead to whatever consciousness is, but we humans think we're "super special", so most of us won't accept that we're really close to creating consciousness, if we haven't already.
Humans are pattern-matchers, indeed, pattern-overmatchers, so it's not unreasonable that you felt that way, but this does not reflect anything like a "thought" from the AI model.
However this is not enough to simply dismiss ChatGPT having "thoughts".
We need to understand first what it means to have "thoughts".
It is my opinion that ChatGPT does not have conciousness. For that it seems to lack self understanding which does not come from simply parroting some utterances found in the data used for the machine learning.
But could it have some inkling of a "thought" anyway? I am not sure but I don't think so. Yet.
My gut says there's something interesting in this interaction that's worth trying to understand.
The key here is that he got ChatGPT to ask him questions. I was like, wait, how does that happen? And his solution was ingenious. He asked it to play a game and taught it the rules. I think it's more than a passing coincidence here that human children also rely on play for learning (they're hardwired for it!).
Is it thinking, probably not. But it sure does look like it's self-directed reasoning, which is a huge step in the right direction.
It's not AGI, but maybe points us in the direction of a cognitive subsystem that we need to investigate/map/theorize/design/implement/iterate that can automate the decision process that the author was prompting the AI to follow.
Essentially, make it so the AI doesn't need a human to follow that line of reasoning, in a general sense. Find a way to let it ask it's own questions, and seek answers. Probably a later phase involves the AI asking humans for help along the way when it's reasoning gets stumped.
So much to learn. :)
>I want you to play a game of 20 questions with me. You will ask me questions, one at a time, to try and determine which animal I am thinking of. You will use my answers to inform your next question. You can guess the animal I am thinking of at any time, but you must make a guess after your twentieth question.
It appeared to break at question 7, but it might be experiencing high usage at the moment.