[swyx]

this nitpicky luddism is so boring.

For 100 years we’ve had machines that can do math

Then we made a new kind of machine that can do words

and now we’re complaining it can’t do math?

Sounds a lot like you are judging a fish by its ability to climb trees.

[nullandvoid]

I think you're missing the point, that words encapsulate some elements of math. If the machine that "does words" can't actually reason about them (how many words am I speaking) then it's of interest, at-least to me.

People will always nitpick until we have perfection, just as we did (and still do) with math machines.

[maxbond]

I think people just want to explore the system & understand what mistakes it makes and why. I don't see anyone in this thread advocating against ChatGPT.

[omnicognate]

I'll advocate against it in its current form. I've seen lots of people saying they have been using ChatGPT heavily and have "learned a lot from it". Based on my own experimentation I'm certain these people have swallowed a large number of falsehoods.

Even I swallowed one despite actively looking for incorrect statements and posting its responses to friends in a discussion about its capabilities (my friends also swallowed it). It said something so mundanely plausible it didn't even occur to me to look it up until the next day, at which point I found it was a complete fabrication.

Even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, says [1] people shouldn't be relying on it for factual queries.

It may come to be useful, but currently it's borderline dangerous.

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1601731295792414720?ref_src=...

[speed_spread]

The point is not that it's wrong, it's that it's not aware of it's own limits and pretends to have an answer for a lot of things it's actually bad at. AI will stay dangerous until they learn to answer "I don't know" and "I'm not sure".

[rjh29]

It's a calculator that returns incorrect answers, says it's correct and justifies its working using made up steps. Old math machines did not do that.