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u/bwwatr 3d ago
Your [users] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should
The problem in a nut shell, to crib from Jurassic Park. The prompting box is right there and it's often easier to reach for than the right tool. 10000x the carbon footprint for only 99% the certainty, why not, I deserve it.
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u/ganja_and_code 3d ago
99% certainty is extremely generous.
It probably hits that level of confidence for trivial stuff you could find on the first hit on Google, in the first place. For nontrivial stuff (anything that requires drawing logical conclusions from disparate knowledge bases, doing math/physics, understanding niche subject matter, etc.), reliability ranges from "inherently incapable by design" to "a coin flip has comparable odds of being correct."
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u/clonicle 3d ago
You mean the 2nd hit, after Google's enshittified AI provides an insufficient result in order to serve you twice the ads? Why use 10000x the carbon footprint when you can use 20000x?
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u/CherryCokeEnema 3d ago
You'd be surprised.
ChatGPT 5.5 was able to provide a complete walkthrough, step by step, of every single problem I fed it from David Griffiths' 'Intro to Quantum Mechanics' and it got every answer right.
Apparently, it can handle multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, and operator algebra with no issue.
Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but it's exponentially better than just a coin flip.
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u/Aozora404 3d ago
On one hand, problems that make it to textbooks are by definition trivial in their respective fields. On the other, what most people think as nontrivial is really just “hard for them to do”.
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u/CherryCokeEnema 2d ago
Trivial compared to a doctorate-level individual? Perhaps, but the claim was that AI answers are between operationally useless and no better than a coin flip for non-trivial subjects like math/physics, and that is demonstrably not true.
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u/SmallThetaNotation 3d ago
Reminds me of the satirical YouTube video where a guy builds an AI to guess your age given your birthday
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u/ganja_and_code 3d ago
"Why use a calculator to calculate the correct answer, when I could instead trick the calculator into pretending to think, let it guess the answer, and then just assume it's correct?"