[arendtio]

To some degree you are right, but I think you forget, that the things they solved already (talking and reasoning about a world that was only presented in the form of abstractions (words)) were supposed to be harder than having a good understanding of numbers, quantities, and logical terms.

My guess is, that they saw the problems ChatGPT has today and worked on solving those problems. And given how important numbers are, they tried to fix how ChatGPT handles/understands numbers. After doing that, they saw how this new version performed much better and predicted, that further work in this area could lead to solving real-world math problems.

I don't think that we will be presented with the highway to singularity, but probably one more step in that direction.