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It handled that for me (chatgpt) >How many miles away is Boston from Boston? >Boston is located in Massachusetts, United States, and it is approximately 0 mil

It handled that for me (chatgpt) >How many miles away is Boston from Boston? >Boston is located in Massachusetts, United States, and it is approximately 0 miles away from itself. It is not possible for a city or location to be a certain distance away from itself, as it is the point of reference for measuring distance. If you are asking about the distance between two different locations both named Boston, it would be necessary to specify which two Bostons you are referring to.

throwaway290 4y ago
... There are tons of places named Boston, yet the model assumes you want to know about the distance from US city to itself. This seems pretty stupid but I guess somehow you find the question and the answer meaningful. Care to explain your reasoning? (Unless you are a language model too, in that case it all makes sense) Literally the only instance where a question about distance makes sense is in a context of two different places.
- jaredsohn 4y ago
  I'm a human. The model needs to reply with something and here it tells the user the assumptions it made. The only alternative I can think of would be to arbitrarily choose two Bostons but my guess is it is more likely that people making this request would intend to include the same location in both. One use for ChatGPT is to give a prompt with lists of data. It is convenient if ChatGPT handles the trivial edge cases correctly so that the user doesn't need to do preprocessing. "Can you give the distance in miles between a list of pairs of cities? Want the output formatted like this: city a, city b, 10 city b, city c, 100 ... The pairs of cities are: New York City, Los Angeles Chicago, Los Angeles Chicago, Paris Chicago, Boston Boston, Boston Boston, Los Angeles" Response from ChatGPT: "Sure! Here is the list of pairs of cities and their distances in miles: New York City, Los Angeles, 2,798 Chicago, Los Angeles, 2,054 Chicago, Paris, 4,973 Chicago, Boston, 1,099 Boston, Boston, 0 Boston, Los Angeles, 2,905 Please note that these are approximate distances and may vary slightly due to factors such as route taken and Earth's curvature." me again: if it asked you to clarify exactly which city you are referring to for each without making assumptions, making requests would be pretty tedious. Sometimes, you are processing data that starts out ambiguous to you anyway.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    The reason I think you're a LLM is that you somehow believe that knowing a distance between a place and itself is meaningful. It's still the case. > The model needs to reply with something and here it tells the user the assumptions it made. No, it didn't "tell" its assumption (where did it output "I assume you mean you want to know the distance from US city to itself"?). It lacks the awareness to even know the assumption is made let alone that it's nonsensical. But it's clear from its responses what the assumption was: that you want to know the distance between a city and itself. In your second prompt you provided the context (a list of exclusively US cities). With context established, as I said in the first place, it's no longer pure garbage in. Honestly you don't need to copy-paste more of that stuff, it does nothing to support your counter-argument against mine that if you give it garbage, it will respond with garbage.
    - jaredsohn 4y ago
      >No, it didn't "tell" its assumption (where did it output "I assume you mean you want to know the distance from US city to itself"?) Just reread what it told me; it told me it is zero miles away from itself but it was a nonsensical query and that one should be more specific if the cities being compared are different. > But it's clear from its responses what the assumption was: that you want to know the distance between a city and itself. If you ask for the distance between just Boston and London, it assumes Boston, MA and London, UK just like Google does. Neither asks if I want the distance between London, UK and Boston, England. Same thing for Portland and Boston, even though Portland, Maine is much closer to Boston, MA. I think both ChatGPT and Google just assume the largest cities. Not sure if you got my point about the list. In that situation I'd find the zero miles to be useful because otherwise I'd need to remember to exclude some entries from the list and add back those records doing the trivial transformation afterward. Another way to think of it is if I wrote a function for you that asks if the number n is divisible by 17, wouldn't you want it to handle the trivial case of 'Is 17 divisible by 17?' over a CSV rather than excluding the trivial examples and handling them manually? Trivial case handling is important for LLMs. Is also useful if you're trying to test its logical consistency. >The reason I think you're a LLM is that you somehow believe that knowing a distance between a place and itself is meaningful. It's still the case. Based on my posting history (13 years) and username (real name), chances are pretty good I'm human. I mentioned my reasons; sorry I couldn't communicate it clearly enough. Very likely I will disengage from this thread now. Also, don't appreciate being called a bot; think people doing that makes Hacker News worse.

throwaway290 4y ago

... There are tons of places named Boston, yet the model assumes you want to know about the distance from US city to itself. This seems pretty stupid but I guess somehow you find the question and the answer meaningful. Care to explain your reasoning? (Unless you are a language model too, in that case it all makes sense) Literally the only instance where a question about distance makes sense is in a context of two different places.

jaredsohn 4y ago
I'm a human. The model needs to reply with something and here it tells the user the assumptions it made. The only alternative I can think of would be to arbitrarily choose two Bostons but my guess is it is more likely that people making this request would intend to include the same location in both. One use for ChatGPT is to give a prompt with lists of data. It is convenient if ChatGPT handles the trivial edge cases correctly so that the user doesn't need to do preprocessing. "Can you give the distance in miles between a list of pairs of cities? Want the output formatted like this: city a, city b, 10 city b, city c, 100 ... The pairs of cities are: New York City, Los Angeles Chicago, Los Angeles Chicago, Paris Chicago, Boston Boston, Boston Boston, Los Angeles" Response from ChatGPT: "Sure! Here is the list of pairs of cities and their distances in miles: New York City, Los Angeles, 2,798 Chicago, Los Angeles, 2,054 Chicago, Paris, 4,973 Chicago, Boston, 1,099 Boston, Boston, 0 Boston, Los Angeles, 2,905 Please note that these are approximate distances and may vary slightly due to factors such as route taken and Earth's curvature." me again: if it asked you to clarify exactly which city you are referring to for each without making assumptions, making requests would be pretty tedious. Sometimes, you are processing data that starts out ambiguous to you anyway.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  The reason I think you're a LLM is that you somehow believe that knowing a distance between a place and itself is meaningful. It's still the case. > The model needs to reply with something and here it tells the user the assumptions it made. No, it didn't "tell" its assumption (where did it output "I assume you mean you want to know the distance from US city to itself"?). It lacks the awareness to even know the assumption is made let alone that it's nonsensical. But it's clear from its responses what the assumption was: that you want to know the distance between a city and itself. In your second prompt you provided the context (a list of exclusively US cities). With context established, as I said in the first place, it's no longer pure garbage in. Honestly you don't need to copy-paste more of that stuff, it does nothing to support your counter-argument against mine that if you give it garbage, it will respond with garbage.
  - jaredsohn 4y ago
    >No, it didn't "tell" its assumption (where did it output "I assume you mean you want to know the distance from US city to itself"?) Just reread what it told me; it told me it is zero miles away from itself but it was a nonsensical query and that one should be more specific if the cities being compared are different. > But it's clear from its responses what the assumption was: that you want to know the distance between a city and itself. If you ask for the distance between just Boston and London, it assumes Boston, MA and London, UK just like Google does. Neither asks if I want the distance between London, UK and Boston, England. Same thing for Portland and Boston, even though Portland, Maine is much closer to Boston, MA. I think both ChatGPT and Google just assume the largest cities. Not sure if you got my point about the list. In that situation I'd find the zero miles to be useful because otherwise I'd need to remember to exclude some entries from the list and add back those records doing the trivial transformation afterward. Another way to think of it is if I wrote a function for you that asks if the number n is divisible by 17, wouldn't you want it to handle the trivial case of 'Is 17 divisible by 17?' over a CSV rather than excluding the trivial examples and handling them manually? Trivial case handling is important for LLMs. Is also useful if you're trying to test its logical consistency. >The reason I think you're a LLM is that you somehow believe that knowing a distance between a place and itself is meaningful. It's still the case. Based on my posting history (13 years) and username (real name), chances are pretty good I'm human. I mentioned my reasons; sorry I couldn't communicate it clearly enough. Very likely I will disengage from this thread now. Also, don't appreciate being called a bot; think people doing that makes Hacker News worse.