ChatGPT is general AI. It perform actions in a class requiring abstract thought which previously only humans were capable of. Sure the applications we see it is capable of are limited now, but that’s a consequence only of it’s operating environment. Using traditional AI techniques like tree search and recursive use of subproblems, which ChatGPT itself could design, it is not obvious to me that any problem is outside of it’s capability in solving.

As to why that is dangerous, there are many reasons.

1. It devalues human life for those in power. Technology has strictly increased wealth inequality over the last century and this takes it to the nth degree. 2. Even in its current form, it is having society destabilizing effects, go on reddit and see posts from high school students asking what they should even study when its clear ChatGPT will be able to do (research, programming, math) better than a degree will prepare them to. 3. Google the paperclip problem. 4. The amount of computing resources it takes to run ChatGPT is shockingly / absurdly low, we are far far from the hardware scaling limits of AI so it is obvious that it will continue to improve, even without further algorithmic breakthroughs.