You're probably right, I'm just having a hard time believing it - it's so much easier to believe that somehow it's just piping output.
You can ask it to write a program that consumes ram, then ask it to show you htop output while running that program and its showing a process hogging 100% CPU and 50% memory. Conversely ask it to write a program that throws a segv and then to show htop output while running that program and it shows no usage.
Again, it's very impressive, but consider this: chatGPT spans many many domains. You can ask it questions about music, screenwriting, programming, math, science. This is what convinces me that it's not "just" provisioning a system and running the commands. In order to get that general of output, you can't waste time setting up these things for this narrow use case of emulating a computer. It would be special cases on top of special cases on top of special cases, it would fall apart quickly.
You can ask it to write a program that consumes ram, then ask it to show you htop output while running that program and its showing a process hogging 100% CPU and 50% memory. Conversely ask it to write a program that throws a segv and then to show htop output while running that program and it shows no usage.