ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#201

Post by jorl17 » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

flavius29663 wrote: post #145

Drakim wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail launched on 1st of april and was thought to be a joke since it gave you a gitabyte (I think) of storage wheras email providers like hotmail gave you 50mb. Chrome launching was also a pretty big deal, I recall.

Google earth was nice too, and street view. It was hard to believe at first. But Chrome was just a re-hash of firefox, nothing exciting there.

A re-hash of Firefox?

I am a Firefox user now, and I was a Firefox user when Chrome came out, but Chrome was miles ahead of Firefox in pretty much most things that mattered for most people, especially performance and usability.

Chrome was a revolution for the web.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#202

Post by rschoultz » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #182

dtech wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy is even more apt when you think that most of the things Apple and Microsoft became big with in the 90's - like mouses and GUIs - were invented as Xerox but they failed to monetize, just like the basis for GTP came from Google and they failed to monetize (externally). I don't think Google is as Xerox- or IBM-ified yet though, they might still bounce back with AI products.

Please anyone willing to answer as if you might be speaking to a golden retriever: How important is a "lead" in this space? I have been comparing ChatGPT and Bard a lot the last two days because this is all very fascinating, and from my datapoint-of-one perspective, it feels like ChatGPT is way, way ahead. Then I start to wonder is this because ChatGPT captivated our attention so much the last few months that they've…

Bard opened to a US-only audience. For being the engine in applications that might propel an LLM ahead of the others, I fail to see that this would be advantageous for opening markets and greeting new customers.

As an example [of the contrary], I noticed Swedish Klarna among the partners that OpenAI revealed when announcing their plug-in API today.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#203

Post by gmuslera » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

Felt a bit underwhelming the example of communication between them, if it will be just that way.

Wolfram Alpha is good, but doesn't hold a candle to how ChatGPT process and understand natural language. That ChatGPT send verbatim the end user input to Wolfram Alpha seem a small step forward over going to Wolfram Alpha and do the very same question.

Now, if the output of ChatGPT is in the Wolfram Alpha "language", expressed in a way that it transmit the ChatGPT interpretation of the question in a way that Wolfram Alpha interprets in the same way (like, i.e. you can ask ChatGPT to make the output in mermaid.js language or any format or programming language) that could be something.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#204

Post by sirsinsalot » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #56

This comes at the price of now both OpenAI and Wolfram getting access to your queries (when you use the plugin, of course). I’m hoping we don’t slide into a future where you either have to give up on confidentiality and privacy or else can’t use any “modern” tools anymore.

We have been there for quite some time.

Both Google and the whole of the UK, US and AUS governments have access to my entire web history.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#205

Post by blowski » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:00 PM UTC

Drakim wrote: post #135

SanderNL wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember Google being this interesting. Ever. It was a good service and very useful, but nothing like this. It was not astonishing. The tech was mildly interesting, but most of all very useful.

Gmail launched on 1st of april and was thought to be a joke since it gave you a gitabyte (I think) of storage wheras email providers like hotmail gave you 50mb. Chrome launching was also a pretty big deal, I recall.

Hotmail only offered 2MB for a long time. Then Yahoo started offering 250MB which seemed crazy. So when Google offered effectively unlimited storage, it really did seem like a joke.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#206

Post by egman_ekki » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:04 PM UTC

jimkleiber wrote: post #185

jug wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's surprising me how quickly they're moving ahead. It's almost as if this is a plan of staggered launches since some year back coming into fruition. I'm not sure how else they could get weekly major announcements like this.

I'm wondering if they are just leapfrogging everyone by using the LLMs to write code faster.

…and copy, marketing strategy, etc

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#207

Post by Futurebot » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

The next grail here would be the automatic use of more trustworthy systems like WA when using ChatGPT in general. If one were to ask it to write an essay on a subject, that it'd infer which pieces need fact-checking based on confidence intervals of snippets of discernable and differentiable data, then run a query against said trustworthy system.

With this improvement, it would at least never get dates or measurements wrong.

I don't think we can ever solve the problem of needing real editors and fact checkers as ultimate sources of truth for ChatGPT's output, especially when it's for something critical, but for many tasks, this would be a major improvement.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#208

Post by ChatGTP » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

charlieyu1 wrote: post #152

logisticpeach wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...

I mean Google search were revolutionary while people had enough with Yahoo. Now the search result of Google had more ads that Yahoo had 20 years ago

On the other hand I used ChatGPT yesterday to explain something to me, it took about 2-3 minutes for the sentence to come back, I “Googled it” and found a better response in 2 seconds.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#209

Post by MagnumOpus » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

rippercushions wrote: post #176

flavius29663 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google earth was nice too, and street view. It was hard to believe at first. But Chrome was just a re-hash of firefox, nothing exciting there.

No, Chrome was a revelation when it came out. It was way faster than Firefox and it had many great features we now take for granted, like isolated tabs, popup blocking etc.

Revisionist history. Firefox had a built-in pop up blocker in 2003, years before Chrome was even a seed in Sundar’s balls. I know because I used it. Chrome was and is a step back, foisted on people with dark patterns, back in the day having speed by sacrificing features like extensibility and customisability.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#210

Post by egman_ekki » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

ElijahLynn wrote: post #120

Last paragraph: I see what’s happening now as a historic moment. For well over half a century the statistical and symbolic approaches to what we might call “AI” evolved largely separately. But now, in ChatGPT + Wolfram they’re being brought together. And while we’re still just at the beginning with this, I think we can reasonably expect tremendous power in the combination—and in a sense a new paradigm for “AI-like co…

I think he might actually be onto something here. If you saw Wolfram use WolframAlpha, he’s very good at it, but you kinda need to know what it knows and how to ask for it to be smooth and useful. If this initial hurdle gets removed, this power could enable the usage of WolframAlpha by many more people. And honestly it’s a very powerful combo.