Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT has an amazing ability to write, but you shouldn't trust it for any form of mathematics aside from providing vague descriptions of what various topics are about (and even that tends to result in a word soup that is more flowery than descriptive). When it comes to solving specific problems, or even providing specific examples of mathematical objects, it falls down really quickly. I'll inevitably be told otherw…
I'm with you. The thing I find baffling is how anyone with any logical sense finds chatGPT useful for anything that requires precision, like math and code. If you do indeed follow the caveats that the LLM companies require placing alongside any output: to not rely on it, and verify it yourself, then you already have to be skilled enough to detect problems, and if you are that skilled, the only way to check the output…
You’re exactly right. It’s a weird example of a technology that is ridiculously impressive (at least at first impression, but also legitimately quite astounding) whilst also being seemingly useless.
I guess the oft-drawn parallels between AI and nuclear weapons are not (yet) that they’re both likely to lead to the apocalypse but more that they both represent era-defining achievements in science/technology whilst simultaneously being utterly unusable for anything productive.
At least nukes have the effect of deterring us from WW3…