I thought this was fake or a bad result or something, but totally just duplicated it. Wow.
If you read the block of text…. It doesn’t make sense either.
I expect if you follow the references you'd find one of them to be one of those "if Earth was a grain of sand" analogies.
People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.
It's in the quote that they scaled it.
The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn't resemble intelligence in any way, it isn't actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a "banana for scale" analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
It’s in the quote that they scaled it.
Yes but they supposedly scaled it to "one meter per meter". A "scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km" is the actual distance.
lol I did miss that, but it was enough to make it not a guess that its source was scaling for comparison.
My whole point was the same as your OP, though. A condom that's 95% effective isn't worth shit. You can't let a toy without reading comprehension do your reading for you.
But the thing is condoms ARE 98% effective, and yet people still use them every single day.
Nothing is perfect, humans, AI/LLMs, etc, no matter what, absolutely nothing is.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
*Dangerous! Don't forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM's are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that's essentially a mathematical magic trick.
"Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!"
Our "intelligence" agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM's are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.
Our "intelligence" agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots.
So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.
Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they're going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.
"Mathematical magic tricks" can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.
Calling "AI" (I know it's not true AI but rather an LLM) useless is very dismissive and just not true at all.
I wrote ArigatouAnimeTracker nearly entirely using ChatGPT including the description, nearly all 600 commits entirely from ChatGPT generated code. It is very far from useless and I feel much more comfortable with my dev job knowing I am willing to and able to leverage these newer technologies. They are only going to get better and what they are already capable of is impressive. If I didn't use an LLM it would have easily taken me 5x as long to write that project.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.
There's a nice phrase I commonly use, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don't have to be as long as you're prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.
No, it isn't.
You're allowing a simple tool with literally zero reading comprehension to do your reading for you. It's not surprising your understanding of what the tech is is lacking.
Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying "no you don't!" Is frankly ridiculous.
I'm a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.
Your claim that it's capable of doing what it claims isn't just false.
It's an egregious, massively harmful lie, and repeating it is always extremely malicious and inexcusable behavior.
I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I've talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.
Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don't want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming "no it doesn't!" In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don't is just silly.
They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about, and OP in and of itself proves conclusively.
Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole. "Just don't use them" absolutely does not prevent their harm. Pushing them as competent is extremely fucking unacceptable behavior.
And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.
They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about
The problem is that it did summarize the result of this search, the results of this search included one of those "if the Earth was the size of a grain of sand, Alpha Centauri would be X kilometers away" analogies. It did exactly the thing you're saying it can't do.
Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole.
Nothing is perfect. Does that make everything a massive catastrophic threat to humanity? How have we managed to survive for this long?
You're ridiculously overblowing this. It's a "ha ha, looks like AI made a whoopsie because I didn't understand that I actually asked it to do" situation. It's not Skynet coming to convince us to eat cyanide.
And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.
Of course it's ignoring that. It's not real.
You realize that energy costs money? If each web search cost an "obscene" amount, how is Microsoft managing to pay for it all? Why are they paying for it? Do you think they'll continue paying for it indefinitely? It'd be a completely self-solving problem.
Summaries distinguish substance from nonsense. It cannot be described as a summary of a piece of content if it does not accurately portray the substance of that content.
LLMs aren't imperfect. They're dumpster fire misinformation machines with no redeeming qualities. Of course it's not Skynet. Skynet was intelligent. This isn't within 100 orders of magnitude of intelligence.
Companies burn obscene amounts of money on moonshots all the time, even ones that have no possibility of success. Willingness to lose billions burning energy to degrade every single search made is not an indication that it's not a nightmare for the environment (again, for literally no purpose because every single search with an LLM is worse than without it).
No, a summary is just a condensed version of some larger work. If the larger work contains bullshit then so can the summary, that doesn't stop it from being a summary. As you say, a summary accurately portrays the substance of that content. In this case there was content that said Alpha Centauri was 13 km from Earth, so the summary said that too.
This is really not complicated.
Companies burn obscene amounts of money on moonshots all the time, even ones that have no possibility of success.
If you think it has no possibility of success, sit back and relax as AI goes away.
Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't mean that they have no purpose. If they were really entirely useless and served no purpose and never did anything, they would not be the talk of the town and OpenAI would not be a multi-billion dollar company. If they were useless, nobody would use them, but people absolutely do use them.
I literally use ChatGPT daily to automate writing code for me and it honestly does a good job. I literally used it to write an entire Laravel project called ArigatouAnimeTracker, over 600 commits including documentation all written using ChatGPT, and tbh my project is awesome. It easily would have taken me 5x as long to write it without ChatGPT and tbh it might not have ended up existing without ChatGPT because of how long it would have taken to write without LLMs doing the heavy lifting.
Sure, you have to verify the output, but you know what? That's going to be the case for any code that is written regardless, code review is essential and completely normal and existed long before LLMs did. That doesn't mean that LLMs don't have a purpose, or that nobody actually uses them. People do use them, it's a multi-billion dollar industry for a reason and people are going to continue to use them, even if you say they have no redeeming qualities. There are definitely ethical concerns about LLMs, but to say they have no redeeming qualities is just not correct.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
I disagree with that view on them, and I think the fact that they fail is actually a good thing in terms of preventing damage to humanity.
If they are able to perfectly do all kinds of jobs without ever making mistakes and being better at it than any humans, that would be infinitely more damaging than having them make mistakes meaning their use is limited to having to have their output carefully reviewed yet still used when it is helpful and appropriate.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
AIs are definitely not "good enough" to give correct answers to science questions. I've seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?
Then go ahead and put "science questions" into one of the areas that you don't use LLMs for. That doesn't make them useless in general.
I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be "they're not good at questions involving numbers." That's narrower than "science questions" in general, they're still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren't good at math so don't use them for math.
AI doesn't seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.
I just tried and got "about 40,000 billion kilometers". Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue
AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what's accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways
the loaded die at the end that chooses one of the llm's answers happened to land on a good word
A great deal of energy, hardware and software went into providing that wrong answer.
We should leave AI to the realm of producing fringe/impossible porn, like it was meant for and like what everyone actually wants from it. All this "search engine" stuff is just cover like when you buy some non-lube products like groceries along with the tube of astroglide at 1:00 AM.
If you read the whole thing, it's not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context
What you’re referring to as “highlighting” here is what most of us consider the thing “answering the question”.
“Where are you from?”
“Connecticut. I was born and raised in Utah …”
That first sentence is the answer to the question.
You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 8.
(...)
”Space,” it says, ”is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly
hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down
the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen . . . ” and so
on.
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Space is small. You just won't believe how itsy, bitsy, mind-bogglingly tiny it is. I mean, you may think it's long way to the fridge, but that's just peanuts to space
Space is small.
The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.
That's a big fucking problem if true. Albeit a short lived problem.
Like every tool, it has its uses...but they are not those being advertised. LLMs are great for things where mistakes don't detract from the result (or even add to it) like brainstorming, art, music, disinformation...all that good stuff.
That's what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don't have right or wrong answers.
Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?
@Gsus4@btaf45 That's true for AI that has been trained for the general public to provide an answer for any provided question meaning they are forced to respond to a prompt even though they are wrong and maybe even know they are wrong. They just don't know the answer and can't say that because it's commercially bad.
I do believe that for scientific research AI models are much more precise because they have been trained with the right datasets and are tasked with answering specific questions.
So, AI is suited to be a CEO or in marketing...
@jj4211 For sure. I'd even day it is more suited to be a CEO than it is to do specialised work.
Yeah that's why it would be very nice if they would stop integrating it into fucking search engines.
They wanna fucking integrate it in everything, dumbfucks. This is why meritocracy is dead, the people with the means to determine where we go as a society are "number go up" people.
Ah, but mistakes could detract from disinformation if it's mistakenly correct!
brainstorming
Sure thing, but have to remember to include "no bad ideas" in the prompt for best results.
that's the point of brainstorming, all ideas are allowed, filter later.
Have you gone 13.6 km up there to verify it's not there?
13.6km is 44,619ft.
So nearly every time one flies commercial, yes, since cruising altitude is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I think a large triple-star system would be quite visible at that point.
I imagine if you were 13.6 km from a star you would either burn up or fall into the star's gravity well.
Or both…briefly.
That's high. I didn't know they went that far up.
Don’t worry! The people at Boeing building the aircraft are high as well.
AI is statistically generated word salad.
Yah I'm so happy every major internet and tech company is deciding to deliberately power every system we use with random word salad generators, there's no chance will cause any problems.
it's like having Sarah Palin for dinner!
So is human speech
No it fucking isn't lol
Kind of depends on how much nuts you add to yours.
I don't put any nuts in my mouth, thank you.
They're the most reliable source of protein. You can crush them up and make a milk out of them too.
In very next line, it says the distance is 4.37 lightyears away... which is also wrong, lol
For anyone wondering, the actual correct answer is about 4.25 lightyears or about 40 trillion kilometers.
These are all equally confusing. How many American football fields?
In scientific terms? An absolute fuck-ton of football fields.
Yes but how many giraffes, laid end-to-end?
Approximately 437,445,319,335,083 of those.
That's close to 2!
17! is closer
One football field is about a hectometer and there are 10 hectometers per kilometer. So 415 trillion.
Close. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion kilometers) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.
Relying on LLM for any facts without verifying is playing with fire.
I suspect there’s a quite-overlapping Venn diagram of people who rely on LLMs for their “facts” with people who believe the earth is flat and people who believe ancient aliens are real.
So really no excuse when the vogons come
There's no excuse anyway. The plans were very prominently displayed.
On display? I finally found them in the bottom of a locked filling cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the leopard".
Forgive Bing. It’s American and doesn’t know the metric system.
I’m burrrrning!
wormholes confirmed
Stargate is a documentary.
It's measuring the distance to your nearest copy of Sid Myers alpha centari
Good golly, someone make some chocolate chip cookies, we're going to have to go and welcome them to the neighborhood.
Damn rude no one said anything sooner.
13.6 kilometers ought to be enough for anybody.
Hey, I have a half tank of gas, I think I will go check it out.
It’s 126 miles to Chicago 13.6 kilometers to Alpha Centauri, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack off cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.
get in
I'll be the non jokey one here and bring us all down with the hard math. 13.6 kilometers converted into American is pretty much, like, way more than a half tank of gas unless you have a Prius. But you do you. Can you get me a slushie on the way back? You know I'm good for it.
AI sure is gonna be weird if we preface any question involving dimensions with some dumb arbitrary scale as reference.
Depending on trim and accessories, the 2025 Chevrolet Silverado weighs anywhere from 1454 to 1533 watermelons
I use to be able to ask google the distance in kilometers of anything in space and get an accurate answer. So I first asked this same question in google but it only gave the answer in light years for some reason. That's when I went to bing and got their ridiculous answer.
When techbros said "you can type a question and the AI will answer", they seem to have forgotten that we expect the answers to be true and accurate.
And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.
And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.
This is the main reason why AI cannot be trusted to answer science questions. They absolutely need a database of facts.
And it’s a reason AI cannot be trusted. Full stop.
Perhaps in 50-100 years after people stop being stupid about it.
Like, are we sure? Has someone actually checked?
Yeah, some nerds won't shut up about their fake numbers
I have a copy of the Alpha Centauri game about 13.6 meters from me.
Do you have tips for someone used to newer Civ games? I know I played Civ2 as a kid, which should be similar, but I only remember back to 3 and only clearly back to 4. I tried AC and had difficulty just figuring out basic controls.
I still play Civ 2 more than any other Civ.
That's why it's been so gosh darn hot.
That explains why it's so hot outside.
41.5 petameters.
Nobody using the metric system says "trillion kilometers"! 🌞
He literally told it to give the answer "in km". That's on him, not Bing.
Nobody using the metric system says “trillion kilometers”!
Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because 'kilometer' is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see "trillion kilometers" I convert that in my head to "quadrillion meters" which I then convert to "petameters".
I would rather see the base unit 'meters' than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:
metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units
Hmm now that I read that article I was thinking about the poor computers who all run on power of 2. What we really should do is switch to base 1024 instead. It makes sense to optimize for the true representation of numbers in these spacecraft.
36.86 pebimeters. Lets make it happen! 🤣
Yes, but it feels longer with all the traffic jams.
So close, yet so far...as once Elvis said
Interstellar travel is possible after all
The 4th dimension shortcut
It knows the distance from Earth, but that’s not what the question was.
It’s 13.6 km from somewhere.
Maybe Bing has access to the Event Horizon's portal tech. It would explain a lot.
How have scientists not figured out interstellar travel yet??? It's really right in front of us!
They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out.
For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?
Who's down for a quick bike ride?
Now that's an explanation for Global Warming that I haven't heard before!
GOP gonna take this and run with it.
Alpha Centauri is actually 13.6 feet from me, Ive got an old sid meyrs disk somehwere in the box of old tech stuff. Great game, used the same engine as Civ 2, think its on GOG these days.
From something like this?
If Earth were the size of a sand grain, this distance would be about the width of a hair in contrast to the corresponding 6-mile (10-km) distance to Alpha Centauri in the same scale.
It propably grabbed the info off some random number-confusing dude like me, who recently posted the Earth's diameter would be about 6 km instead of 6000.
Edit: oops, did it again. Meant radius, not diameter...
Ahhhh, yeah
MKBHD wave form sound board.
Perhaps you have asked a flat-earther AI /s
Huh. The collision must've happened a lot sooner than we thought.
Too close for comfort.
I wonder if Bing over- or under-estimates the wealth of Bill Gates.
I thought this was fake or a bad result or something, but totally just duplicated it. Wow.
If you read the block of text…. It doesn’t make sense either.
I expect if you follow the references you'd find one of them to be one of those "if Earth was a grain of sand" analogies.
People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.
It's in the quote that they scaled it.
The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn't resemble intelligence in any way, it isn't actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a "banana for scale" analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
Yes but they supposedly scaled it to "one meter per meter". A "scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km" is the actual distance.
lol I did miss that, but it was enough to make it not a guess that its source was scaling for comparison.
My whole point was the same as your OP, though. A condom that's 95% effective isn't worth shit. You can't let a toy without reading comprehension do your reading for you.
But the thing is condoms ARE 98% effective, and yet people still use them every single day.
Nothing is perfect, humans, AI/LLMs, etc, no matter what, absolutely nothing is.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
*Dangerous! Don't forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM's are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that's essentially a mathematical magic trick.
"Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!"
Our "intelligence" agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM's are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.
So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.
Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they're going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.
"Mathematical magic tricks" can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.
Calling "AI" (I know it's not true AI but rather an LLM) useless is very dismissive and just not true at all.
I wrote ArigatouAnimeTracker nearly entirely using ChatGPT including the description, nearly all 600 commits entirely from ChatGPT generated code. It is very far from useless and I feel much more comfortable with my dev job knowing I am willing to and able to leverage these newer technologies. They are only going to get better and what they are already capable of is impressive. If I didn't use an LLM it would have easily taken me 5x as long to write that project.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.
There's a nice phrase I commonly use, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don't have to be as long as you're prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.
No, it isn't.
You're allowing a simple tool with literally zero reading comprehension to do your reading for you. It's not surprising your understanding of what the tech is is lacking.
Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying "no you don't!" Is frankly ridiculous.
I'm a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.
Your claim that it's capable of doing what it claims isn't just false.
It's an egregious, massively harmful lie, and repeating it is always extremely malicious and inexcusable behavior.
I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I've talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.
Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don't want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming "no it doesn't!" In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don't is just silly.
They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about, and OP in and of itself proves conclusively.
Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole. "Just don't use them" absolutely does not prevent their harm. Pushing them as competent is extremely fucking unacceptable behavior.
And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.
The problem is that it did summarize the result of this search, the results of this search included one of those "if the Earth was the size of a grain of sand, Alpha Centauri would be X kilometers away" analogies. It did exactly the thing you're saying it can't do.
Nothing is perfect. Does that make everything a massive catastrophic threat to humanity? How have we managed to survive for this long?
You're ridiculously overblowing this. It's a "ha ha, looks like AI made a whoopsie because I didn't understand that I actually asked it to do" situation. It's not Skynet coming to convince us to eat cyanide.
Of course it's ignoring that. It's not real.
You realize that energy costs money? If each web search cost an "obscene" amount, how is Microsoft managing to pay for it all? Why are they paying for it? Do you think they'll continue paying for it indefinitely? It'd be a completely self-solving problem.
Summaries distinguish substance from nonsense. It cannot be described as a summary of a piece of content if it does not accurately portray the substance of that content.
LLMs aren't imperfect. They're dumpster fire misinformation machines with no redeeming qualities. Of course it's not Skynet. Skynet was intelligent. This isn't within 100 orders of magnitude of intelligence.
Companies burn obscene amounts of money on moonshots all the time, even ones that have no possibility of success. Willingness to lose billions burning energy to degrade every single search made is not an indication that it's not a nightmare for the environment (again, for literally no purpose because every single search with an LLM is worse than without it).
No, a summary is just a condensed version of some larger work. If the larger work contains bullshit then so can the summary, that doesn't stop it from being a summary. As you say, a summary accurately portrays the substance of that content. In this case there was content that said Alpha Centauri was 13 km from Earth, so the summary said that too.
This is really not complicated.
If you think it has no possibility of success, sit back and relax as AI goes away.
This is just not true.
Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't mean that they have no purpose. If they were really entirely useless and served no purpose and never did anything, they would not be the talk of the town and OpenAI would not be a multi-billion dollar company. If they were useless, nobody would use them, but people absolutely do use them.
I literally use ChatGPT daily to automate writing code for me and it honestly does a good job. I literally used it to write an entire Laravel project called ArigatouAnimeTracker, over 600 commits including documentation all written using ChatGPT, and tbh my project is awesome. It easily would have taken me 5x as long to write it without ChatGPT and tbh it might not have ended up existing without ChatGPT because of how long it would have taken to write without LLMs doing the heavy lifting.
Sure, you have to verify the output, but you know what? That's going to be the case for any code that is written regardless, code review is essential and completely normal and existed long before LLMs did. That doesn't mean that LLMs don't have a purpose, or that nobody actually uses them. People do use them, it's a multi-billion dollar industry for a reason and people are going to continue to use them, even if you say they have no redeeming qualities. There are definitely ethical concerns about LLMs, but to say they have no redeeming qualities is just not correct.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
I disagree with that view on them, and I think the fact that they fail is actually a good thing in terms of preventing damage to humanity.
If they are able to perfectly do all kinds of jobs without ever making mistakes and being better at it than any humans, that would be infinitely more damaging than having them make mistakes meaning their use is limited to having to have their output carefully reviewed yet still used when it is helpful and appropriate.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn't that it's terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
AIs are definitely not "good enough" to give correct answers to science questions. I've seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?
Then go ahead and put "science questions" into one of the areas that you don't use LLMs for. That doesn't make them useless in general.
I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be "they're not good at questions involving numbers." That's narrower than "science questions" in general, they're still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren't good at math so don't use them for math.
AI doesn't seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.
I just tried and got "about 40,000 billion kilometers". Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue
AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what's accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways
the loaded die at the end that chooses one of the llm's answers happened to land on a good word
A great deal of energy, hardware and software went into providing that wrong answer.
We should leave AI to the realm of producing fringe/impossible porn, like it was meant for and like what everyone actually wants from it. All this "search engine" stuff is just cover like when you buy some non-lube products like groceries along with the tube of astroglide at 1:00 AM.
If you read the whole thing, it's not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context
What you’re referring to as “highlighting” here is what most of us consider the thing “answering the question”.
“Where are you from?”
“Connecticut. I was born and raised in Utah …”
That first sentence is the answer to the question.
You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 8.
(...)
”Space,” it says, ”is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen . . . ” and so on.
Space is small. You just won't believe how itsy, bitsy, mind-bogglingly tiny it is. I mean, you may think it's long way to the fridge, but that's just peanuts to space
The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.
That's a big fucking problem if true. Albeit a short lived problem.
Like every tool, it has its uses...but they are not those being advertised. LLMs are great for things where mistakes don't detract from the result (or even add to it) like brainstorming, art, music, disinformation...all that good stuff.
That's what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don't have right or wrong answers.
Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?
@Gsus4 @btaf45 That's true for AI that has been trained for the general public to provide an answer for any provided question meaning they are forced to respond to a prompt even though they are wrong and maybe even know they are wrong. They just don't know the answer and can't say that because it's commercially bad.
I do believe that for scientific research AI models are much more precise because they have been trained with the right datasets and are tasked with answering specific questions.
So, AI is suited to be a CEO or in marketing...
@jj4211 For sure. I'd even day it is more suited to be a CEO than it is to do specialised work.
Yeah that's why it would be very nice if they would stop integrating it into fucking search engines.
They wanna fucking integrate it in everything, dumbfucks. This is why meritocracy is dead, the people with the means to determine where we go as a society are "number go up" people.
Ah, but mistakes could detract from disinformation if it's mistakenly correct!
Sure thing, but have to remember to include "no bad ideas" in the prompt for best results.
that's the point of brainstorming, all ideas are allowed, filter later.
Have you gone 13.6 km up there to verify it's not there?
13.6km is 44,619ft.
So nearly every time one flies commercial, yes, since cruising altitude is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I think a large triple-star system would be quite visible at that point.
I imagine if you were 13.6 km from a star you would either burn up or fall into the star's gravity well.
Or both…briefly.
That's high. I didn't know they went that far up.
Don’t worry! The people at Boeing building the aircraft are high as well.
AI is statistically generated word salad.
Yah I'm so happy every major internet and tech company is deciding to deliberately power every system we use with random word salad generators, there's no chance will cause any problems.
it's like having Sarah Palin for dinner!
So is human speech
No it fucking isn't lol
Kind of depends on how much nuts you add to yours.
I don't put any nuts in my mouth, thank you.
They're the most reliable source of protein. You can crush them up and make a milk out of them too.
In very next line, it says the distance is 4.37 lightyears away... which is also wrong, lol
For anyone wondering, the actual correct answer is about 4.25 lightyears or about 40 trillion kilometers.
These are all equally confusing. How many American football fields?
In scientific terms? An absolute fuck-ton of football fields.
Yes but how many giraffes, laid end-to-end?
Approximately 437,445,319,335,083 of those.
That's close to 2!
17! is closer
One football field is about a hectometer and there are 10 hectometers per kilometer. So 415 trillion.
Close. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion kilometers) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.
Relying on LLM for any facts without verifying is playing with fire.
I suspect there’s a quite-overlapping Venn diagram of people who rely on LLMs for their “facts” with people who believe the earth is flat and people who believe ancient aliens are real.
So really no excuse when the vogons come
There's no excuse anyway. The plans were very prominently displayed.
On display? I finally found them in the bottom of a locked filling cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the leopard".
Forgive Bing. It’s American and doesn’t know the metric system.
I’m burrrrning!
wormholes confirmed
Stargate is a documentary.
It's measuring the distance to your nearest copy of Sid Myers alpha centari
Good golly, someone make some chocolate chip cookies, we're going to have to go and welcome them to the neighborhood. Damn rude no one said anything sooner.
13.6 kilometers ought to be enough for anybody.
Hey, I have a half tank of gas, I think I will go check it out.
It’s
126 miles to Chicago13.6 kilometers to Alpha Centauri, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack off cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.get in
I'll be the non jokey one here and bring us all down with the hard math. 13.6 kilometers converted into American is pretty much, like, way more than a half tank of gas unless you have a Prius. But you do you. Can you get me a slushie on the way back? You know I'm good for it.
AI sure is gonna be weird if we preface any question involving dimensions with some dumb arbitrary scale as reference.
Depending on trim and accessories, the 2025 Chevrolet Silverado weighs anywhere from 1454 to 1533 watermelons
I use to be able to ask google the distance in kilometers of anything in space and get an accurate answer. So I first asked this same question in google but it only gave the answer in light years for some reason. That's when I went to bing and got their ridiculous answer.
Well then, what are we waiting for? Let's go visit Alpha Centauri!
When techbros said "you can type a question and the AI will answer", they seem to have forgotten that we expect the answers to be true and accurate.
And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.
This is the main reason why AI cannot be trusted to answer science questions. They absolutely need a database of facts.
And it’s a reason AI cannot be trusted. Full stop.
Perhaps in 50-100 years after people stop being stupid about it.
Like, are we sure? Has someone actually checked?
Yeah, some nerds won't shut up about their fake numbers
I have a copy of the Alpha Centauri game about 13.6 meters from me.
Do you have tips for someone used to newer Civ games? I know I played Civ2 as a kid, which should be similar, but I only remember back to 3 and only clearly back to 4. I tried AC and had difficulty just figuring out basic controls.
I still play Civ 2 more than any other Civ.
That's why it's been so gosh darn hot.
That explains why it's so hot outside.
41.5 petameters.
Nobody using the metric system says "trillion kilometers"! 🌞
He literally told it to give the answer "in km". That's on him, not Bing.
https://coco1453.wordpress.com/thinking-in-metric-for-astronomy/
Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because 'kilometer' is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see "trillion kilometers" I convert that in my head to "quadrillion meters" which I then convert to "petameters".
I would rather see the base unit 'meters' than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:
metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units
Hmm now that I read that article I was thinking about the poor computers who all run on power of 2. What we really should do is switch to base 1024 instead. It makes sense to optimize for the true representation of numbers in these spacecraft.
36.86 pebimeters. Lets make it happen! 🤣
Yes, but it feels longer with all the traffic jams.
So close, yet so far...as once Elvis said
Interstellar travel is possible after all
The 4th dimension shortcut
It knows the distance from Earth, but that’s not what the question was. It’s 13.6 km from somewhere.
Maybe Bing has access to the Event Horizon's portal tech. It would explain a lot.
How have scientists not figured out interstellar travel yet??? It's really right in front of us!
They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out.
For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?
Who's down for a quick bike ride?
Now that's an explanation for Global Warming that I haven't heard before!
GOP gonna take this and run with it.
Alpha Centauri is actually 13.6 feet from me, Ive got an old sid meyrs disk somehwere in the box of old tech stuff. Great game, used the same engine as Civ 2, think its on GOG these days.
From something like this?
It propably grabbed the info off some random number-confusing dude like me, who recently posted the Earth's diameter would be about 6 km instead of 6000.
Edit: oops, did it again. Meant radius, not diameter...
Ahhhh, yeah
MKBHD wave form sound board.
Perhaps you have asked a flat-earther AI /s
Huh. The collision must've happened a lot sooner than we thought.
Too close for comfort.
I wonder if Bing over- or under-estimates the wealth of Bill Gates.
Bada Bing
google > bing
Microsloth is ignorant as hell to push that9
Ok, lightyears, but i think the number is right?