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Scientific questions are, without being disparaging, mostly trivia. ChatGPT knows all of Wikipedia. If an answer could be found by extracting a passage from a W

Scientific questions are, without being disparaging, mostly trivia. ChatGPT knows all of Wikipedia. If an answer could be found by extracting a passage from a Wikipedia article, ChatGPT will do a good job of answering it. Ask ChatGPT to do any engineering work, and it falls flat. It's poor mathematical skills and lack of ability to create complex plans mean that it is relying purely on it's coherent-sounding dialog.

mach1ne 4y ago
Slight correction: ChatGPT will PROBABLY do a good job of answering factual questions. It still sometimes hallucinates even when asking known facts, thus it inherently can't be trusted.
- TillE 4y ago
  Yeah, but this is a problem where I can think of plausible solutions without hand-waving radical AI advancements. For a factual claim, it could look at each sentence and see if the equivalent information exists on Wikipedia, or another online source, or even a book. And then link to that source. Google has already digested all that information, so it's just a matter of finding clever ways to connect them. I don't think it would ever be flawless, but it could be turned into an extremely capable research assistant.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
You are perfect for HN.
PeterisP 4y ago
I find ChatGPT to be very helpful in the type of engineering work where I typically used StackOverflow - if you use it to look up how to do a simple but niche thing where I don't want to reinvent the wheel, in a language that's not one of my main ones, it gives working code with a reasonable explanation and that is much faster than looking the same thing up in the documentation which, depending on the language, is of very varying quality. I can do the complex plans myself, but automation is quite helpful when looking up, for example, what is the idiomatic way to do datetime manipulation in some language which I haven't used in years.

mach1ne 4y ago

Slight correction: ChatGPT will PROBABLY do a good job of answering factual questions. It still sometimes hallucinates even when asking known facts, thus it inherently can't be trusted.

TillE 4y ago
Yeah, but this is a problem where I can think of plausible solutions without hand-waving radical AI advancements. For a factual claim, it could look at each sentence and see if the equivalent information exists on Wikipedia, or another online source, or even a book. And then link to that source. Google has already digested all that information, so it's just a matter of finding clever ways to connect them. I don't think it would ever be flawless, but it could be turned into an extremely capable research assistant.

krainboltgreene 4y ago

You are perfect for HN.

PeterisP 4y ago

I find ChatGPT to be very helpful in the type of engineering work where I typically used StackOverflow - if you use it to look up how to do a simple but niche thing where I don't want to reinvent the wheel, in a language that's not one of my main ones, it gives working code with a reasonable explanation and that is much faster than looking the same thing up in the documentation which, depending on the language, is of very varying quality. I can do the complex plans myself, but automation is quite helpful when looking up, for example, what is the idiomatic way to do datetime manipulation in some language which I haven't used in years.