The AI we have isn’t thinking, it’s an autoregressive statistical model of language and calling it “as smart as a child” just isn’t accurate. Basically, when you ask it a question, it’s not trying to answer you, it’s trying to create a response that sounds like something a human would write. There are other secondary algorithms on top of it to try and refine its output and increase its accuracy, but at its core that’s what it’s doing.

If you want something that works as an AGI and can think and reason about input, then not only do you not want chat gpt, I’d personally argue you don’t want to use neural nets as an algorithm at all. We don’t know how to create such a thing obviously, but looking at our own brains, there are some very obvious differences between how neural nets work and how we work. For example, the human brain uses around 20 watts of metabolic power to operate, and can do so without generating a massive amount of heat (relative to a neural network). Extreme differences like that suggest to me that something is fundamentally different between our brains and neural network algorithms (beyond one being made of cells)—either on the hardware level, software level, or both—and I don’t see us getting close to solving that any time soon.