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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

A few days ago, a person in an IRC channel I'm in was convinced AMD GPUs have CUDA cores, because they put "amd 5500rx cuda cores" into Google, saw the infobox entry that said "How many CUDA cores does a Rx 5700 have? 2,560 CUDA cores" and stubbornly refused to accept Google could be wrong.

Amusingly that same infobox then has a table that states "2,560 stream processors" in the "Radeon RX 5700 XT" column. So one half of the ML parsed the web page correctly, presumably into some internal non-ambiguous representation, but then the other half of the ML interpreted it incorrectly anyway. Also, the "5500rx" (search query), "Rx 5700" (infobox title) and "RX 5700 XT" (infobox table header) are three different cards with different numbers of stream processors.

And people wonder why ML gets a bad rep.

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It's so strange, that infobox has never given me an accurate answer or an accurate question! What I mean by that is, it will find some snippet that sort of looks like it answers the question, but it's nearly always misleading. It's either lacking context, creating a question that doesn't make sense or just plain wrong. I avoid the thing like the plague and look for real answers in the actual search results (which are often the same pages, but at least provide context as to what question they are answering and how)

Oh no this is worrisome, I hadn't thought to take the box data as a "maybe correct"... given that I am often googling something I am unsure about.

Indeed, especially when AI/ML decide to ban your account with no recourse and no explanation ...

ML is not at fault - it's probably doing what it's trained to do. It's the marketing that makes people expect that if ML blackbox managed to do a couple of parlor tricks like distinguishing a cat from a banana and faking something resembling a human-written text, if you don't look too closely, then it's almost as good as a human brain. It's not. It's pretty much as dumb as a refrigerator (a very complex one, with many many buttons, but still a refrigerator). So you shouldn't expect too much from it, and then there's no reason to give it bad rep.

I think it's valuable to shift the focus from the information to the presentation of information. The information isn't controlled by Google, but the presentation absolutely is, and as mentioned elsewhere, makes the ML look authoritative, and seems to be implying an attribution to (if not outright falsely sourcing) Wikipedia, contradictions and all.

The tech is pretty neat and all, but this is a blatant misuse.

It starts to get pretty circular when you consider that GPUs can be used for ML.

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