Of course Stephen Wolfram would (implicitly) beat me to this hot take: Wolfram Alpha is, and has been, more impressive in its domains than ChatGPT is at anything in particular.
Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
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Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#12Im amused to see that this is almost exactly the same idea I came up with for the ChatGPT-sucks-at-facts problem.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#13Wolfram alpha is super useful for crazy unit conversions, I would love ChatGPT to be able to answer how many bananas of solar radiation are required to kill all the bacteria on an acre of concrete.
Best comment I've read in a while
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#14I always wondered who is the customer of Wolfram Alpha asking for solution of an integral? (A part from students
It is a huge time saver for people doing applied math and needing quick answers to questions in order to iterate (I do have a soft spot for SymPy if you need to answer several related questions).
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#15Wolfram alpha is super useful for crazy unit conversions, I would love ChatGPT to be able to answer how many bananas of solar radiation are required to kill all the bacteria on an acre of concrete.
I usually just use google (calculator) for unit conversions, because it is less rigid in what it expects and it returns faster.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#16Wolfram alpha is super useful for crazy unit conversions, I would love ChatGPT to be able to answer how many bananas of solar radiation are required to kill all the bacteria on an acre of concrete.
This is the perfect HN comment - it made my overly obsessive HN consumption for the last decade worth it.
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Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#17By now there are as-yet undiscovered tribes in the Amazon rainforest who know that ChatGPT is garbage at maths!
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#18I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams!
I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's titanic song "Dopesmoker" and asked it to generate a song with similar lyrics. It informed me that it wasn't comfortable writing a song that glorified substance abuse.
I also just recently watched Deadwood (which is phenomenal, btw) and asked it to generate a monologue in the style of Al Swearengen on the topic of a good night's rest. The first thing return contained not one curse word, so I told ChatGPT that it should include some more instances of "fuckin" to better match Swearengen's filthy-mouthed yet lyrical style of speech. It refused to use that level of profanity.
I asked it if it would generate a slightly more profane example at whatever level it was OK with, and it did add some cursing, but not nearly matching Swearengen's potty mouth. (The monologue also kinda sucked, but that one I'll give it a pass on, since Milch's writing was pretty incredible.)
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#19Im amused to see that this is almost exactly the same idea I came up with for the ChatGPT-sucks-at-facts problem.
It’s a fairly obvious idea, considering WA was the immediate comparison to gpt3/chatgpt.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
#20Not sure why this isn't triggering any discussion? I recall reading a QuantaMagazine issue about combining a Cyc-like (old school AI database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc ) with GPT-2: https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-compute... they had some success improving "common sense" in AI. Combining Mathematica with ChatGPT would be similar and could improve these new AI reliability.
If WolframAlpha were more open, there would be more discussion about it. That's the price WolframAlpha pays for its extreme walled-garden, black box strategy.