Simple tasks fail. Sorting a list of city names

After testing some creative features in Chatgpt 3.5 and now 4. I am testing it for practical use in a daily task sort of way, like you might use in a job or at work. I can do some things in a spreadsheet, or using programming. But why not let Chat sort, compile, analyze a list ? For 3 days I have been loading a list of cities and states each morning, Chatgpt job is to sort the list of cities and tell me a few things about the cities, the list is never over 1,789 entries, and today was only 241 entries. When asked to recite the list back, it first only showed 80, then when you go hey, you made a mistake, it apologizes then lists 130 items. It struggles with really simple tasks. My point of all of this is, if it cannot accurately process really simple things, how can it be used to handle important and complex things ?
I keep asking Chat if it has memory limitations, it says it does not. I ask if there are some other problems why it cannot repeat back a simple list of relatively few items, it says it can do it, just give it one more chance. But it fails repeatedly. I need to decide how to proceed. I am expected to determine which tasks are appropriate for Chatgpt, and which types of work must not be done in chat. Can anyone help me understand , maybe just tell me, what never to do in this product ? I am tired of watching the simple fails and want to move on. As hard as Chatgpt tries, I have a feeling it cannot process data.

2 Likes