[GuB-42]

Asking ChatGPT, I have:

- The scientific method

- Calculus

- Einstein's Relativity

- Darwin's Evolution

And more generally:

- The zero

- Formal logic

- The written language

This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.

Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.

Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.

[raptor99]

Hmm, I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because most LLMs have ingested scads of utter online shit in, so guess what comes out.

[GuB-42]

Among the "scads of utter online shit" is the submitted website for which it mostly agrees with. It also agrees with most of the comments here.

But the thing is, I used a LLM because I want to see the "scads of utter online shit". The "greatest intellectual achievement" is an opinion reflecting what people think matters most, not an empirical fact. And what I want is something approaching a global consensus, not what the HN bubble thinks matters. And for that, I think LLMs have value.

And anyways, what LLMs say generally match what people are saying here, so unless you are implying that we are all talking shit, I don't really see the problem.