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by ben_w 1040 days ago
Is it provably not turning complete? That property pops up everywhere even when not intended, like Magic: The Gathering card interactions.

Technically you may not want to call it Turing complete given the limited context window, but I'd say that's like insisting a Commodore 64 isn't Turing complete for the same reason.

Likewise the default settings may be a bit too random to be a Turing machine, but that criticism would also apply to a human.

1 comments

It is basically a single huge matrix multiplication — you need some form of loop/repetition/recursion to be Turing complete.

Sure it is not a hard property, excel, css with mouse movements, game of life are all that, but they need a “possibly forever running” part.

ChatGPT does have a loop, that's why it produces more than one token.

In this context, that the possibility of running "forever" would also exclude the humans (to which it is being compared) is relevant — even if we spend all day thinking in words at the rate of 160wpm and .75 words per token, we fall asleep around every 200k tokens, and some models (not from OpenAI) exceed that in their input windows.

Yet I can solve many sudoku problems in a single wake cycle.

Also, its output is language and it can’t change a former part of speech, can only append to it. When “thinking” about what to say next, it can’t “loop” over that, only whether to append some more text to it. Its looping is strictly within a “static context”.