It’s absolutely amazing, but it is also literally and technologically impossible for that to spontaneously coelesce into reason/logic/sentience.
This is not true. If you train these models on game of Othello, they’ll keep a state of the world internally and use that to predict the next move played (1). To execute addition and multiplication they are executing an algorithm on which they were not explicitly trained (although the gpt family is surprisingly bad at it, due to a badly designed tokenizer).
These models are still pretty bad at most reasoning tasks. But training on predicting the next word is a perfectly valid strategy, after all the best way to predict what comes after the “=” in 1432 + 212 = is to do the addition.
I’m afraid that would not be sufficient.
These instructions are a small part of what makes a model answer like it does. Much more important is the training data. If you want to make a racist model, training it on racist text is sufficient.
Great care is put in the training data of these models by AI companies, to ensure that their biases are socially acceptable. If you train an LLM on the internet without care, a user will easily be able to prompt them into saying racist text.
Gab is forced to use this prompt because they’re unable to train a model, but as other comments show it’s pretty weak way to force a bias.
The ideal solution for transparency would be public sharing of the training data.