If you subscribe to extended mind theory and Merleau Ponty's brand of phenomenology, tools are just an extension of your cognitive process, and "shelling out" in this way is really to be expected of high intelligence, if not consciousness. Some would say it might even be a prerequisite for consciousness, that you need to be a being-in-the-world etc etc
Not to say that GPT is conscious, in its current form I think it certainly isn't, but rather I would say reasoning is a positive development, not an embarrassing one
I can't compute 297298*248 immediately in my head, and if I were to try it I'd have to hobble through a multiplicaion algorithm, in my head... it's quite simlar to what they're doing here, it's just they can wire it right into a real calculator instead of slowly running a shitty algo on wetware
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