btaf45Bing says Alpha Centauri is 13.6 kilometers from us
wormholes confirmed
Stargate is a documentary.
I’m burrrrning!
Interstellar travel is possible after all
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.
FaceDeerI 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.
*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.
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.
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.
If you think it has no possibility of success, sit back and relax as AI goes away.
Yep. This is exactly it, and this is what people don’t seem to understand. AI is not going away, because it is actually useful, it has actual uses and people are actively using it. It’s not entirely fluff based pointless technology like blockchain etc, it is actually useful and real-world people use AI/LLMs.
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.
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, over 600 commits including documentation, and tbh my project is awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Calling it 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.
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
IntheflsunGood 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.
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.
ianovic69It’s a mess. I just used Google Assistant (not even Gemini) to ask the distance in km and got this -
According to the website Space, the distance is 37.8 trillion km.
I know which one I’m going with but finding out assistant is wrong is a big deal. Lots of people will assume like I did that the info is just pulled from relevant websites. Can’t do that now.
According to the website Space, the distance is 37.8 trillion km.
This is not correct, and is probably the result of rounding the light year distance to 4 ly before converting to km. The google answer is pretty close.
The correct answer is the distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion km) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.
Space.com got it wrong? Well that will teach me to triple check my sources!
Thanks for clarifying.
PunkieThat explains why it’s so hot outside.
Who’s down for a quick bike ride?
I wonder if Bing over- or under-estimates the wealth of Bill Gates.
Cyber YukiWhen 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.
ulkeshAnd it’s a reason AI cannot be trusted. Full stop.
Perhaps in 50-100 years after people stop being stupid about it.
Bahnd RollardAlpha Centauri is actually 13.6 feet from me, Ive got an old sid meyrs disk somehwere in the box if old tech stuff. Great game, used the same engine as Civ 2, think its on GOG these days.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆Huh. The collision must’ve happened a lot sooner than we thought.
darklamerNow that’s an explanation for Global Warming that I haven’t heard before!
GOP gonna take this and run with it.
It knows the distance from Earth, but that’s not what the question was.
It’s 13.6 km from somewhere.
BuelldozerI have a copy of the Alpha Centauri game about 13.6 meters from me.
VindictiveJudgeDo 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.
Bada Bing
rhabarbaTo be fair, the distance is 13.6 kilometers if you redefine the kilometer according to the “scale” mentioned in the answer.
It propably grabbed the info of some random number-confusing dude like me, who recently posted the Earth’s diameter would be about 6 km instead of 6000.
Jo MiranMaybe Bing has access to the Event Horizon’s portal tech. It would explain a lot.
BlueÆtherFrom 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.
mercanoYou may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
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 fridges, but that’s just peanuts to space
Space is small.
The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.
A_AThe 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,” 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.