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Comment by dxbydt | Hacker News Reader

Here's a very easy middle school competition problem - https://imgur.com/a/YdFSBVY

It repeatedly got the answer wrong. I engaged in a long conversation with it (too long to post) where I tried to convince it that its answer was wrong, but it became quite rude at a certain point & alleged I was trying to trick it or something (?!) so I just gave up. Unfortunately, I was doing the whole exercise in front of my 10 year old who was initially very excited about ChatGPT. After seeing its behavior, he is now convinced that its dumb as dirt.

If you look at the problem, ChatGPT's answer is the 2nd term of the input series! Obviously an all positive series can't have one of its own terms as an answer, the answer better be bigger than each of its terms. So forget about calculation, it has no logical reasoning ability either.

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You should basically be thinking of chatGPT as a personal Wikipedia. It has the collective knowledge of the internet. It can still be wrong about fact based questions, but is a good starting point. It’s not effective at doing math because that’s not what it was designed to do.

ChatGPT definitely way more things than Wikipedia does.

But does it accidentally words as much?

I think that is significantly underselling wikipedia's reliability in practise.

The point is that Wikipedia is infinitely more fallible than a mathematical equation.

That doesn't make sense. Math equations are expressions of ideas. They can be fallible as much as anything else. Just because 1+1=3 is an equation doesn't make it true.

Yes of course and Euclid's parallel postulate is a matter of fact in your opinion too?

We use abstractions friend, some are useful often and others are not often used.

If I post that same question on Wikipedia and confidently assert the answer is 1, some good Samaritan will edit it within a day & say no dumbass its 6, and then link me to the Talk page & we'll duke it out over there. On ChatGPT, you have no recourse other than the thumb down button. When you give it the right answer it simply refuses to accept! It's sure amusing as an adult, but be aware that several schools (atleast here in the midwest) are discussing this in the classroom - my kid said his teacher was talking about ChatGPT and that's why I proceeded to show what it does. So kids might be quite confused by this behavior. Better to just go with the standard disclaimer "I don't know. As a large language model trained by ClosedAI blah blah blah insert boilerplate here, I can't figure out the answers to basic equations mankind has known for a few centuries now unless more VC money forthcoming. Ask Powell to pause his ratehikes and market shoots back up, we staff up the org with few mathematicians and they'll tell you its 6. Right now its 1, suck it dummy"

Well my point is there aren't pages for specific math problems on wikipedia, because that's not the goal of wikipedia. ChatGPT can tell you the rules of algebra, but it's bad at applying them. If you want to solve math problems you should go to wolframalpha.

My personal opinion is that having an encyclopedia that is sometimes wrong is actually incredibly valuable for educating people in the social media age. Distinguishing between content that is true and content that sounds true is a skill that used to be unneeded but is now essentially a requirement to productively participate in society. ChatGPT seems like a decent way to train that skill.

The problem is when it's not objectively wrong but it has an opinion of what is right and refuses to consider alternatives. Just had an experience with it when I asked for advice on xyz it effectively said "xyz is bad, um-kay" when "xyz" was not objectively bad and there are debates about it all over. I tried 5 ~ 6 different ways to get it to acknowledge there were different points of view but it just kept parroting the same paragraph that effectively said "xyz is bad, um-kay"

It made me really scared for the day there is the one "true think" and that's the only answer you get from Siri, Google, etc...

You're misunderstanding the parent. They mean that in school, teachers tell you to use Wikipedia as simply a starting point rather than an authoritative source (indeed, look at the article's actual sources and references at the bottom and read those), not to literally use Wikipedia to perform mathematical operations.

In the same vein, use ChatGPT but verify its answers.

ChatGPT, the free encyclopedia that no one can edit!

In case anyone wants a solution to this “very easy middle school competition problem”: https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-solve-this-analytically-sum...

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