Even though our current models can be really complex, they are still very very far away from being the elusive General Purpose AI sci-fi authors have been writing about for decades (if not centuries) already. GPT and others like it are merely Large Language Models, so don’t expect them to handle anything other than language.

Humans think of the world through language, so it’s very easy to be deceived by an LLM to think that you’re actually talking to a GPAI. That misconception is an inherent flaw of the human mind. Language comes so naturally to us, and we’re often use it as a shortcut to assess the intelligence of other people. Generally speaking that works reasonably well, but an LLM is able to exploit that feature of human behavior in order to appear to be smarter than it really is.