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Comment by icedistilled | Hacker News Reader

Please Note, the connotation of 'Insane' in the title is insane as in 'is a lunatic' not as in 'is insanely cool'.

Wolfram alpha said converting U-238 to food calories was nonsensical, but chat gpt decided it would ignore wolfram alpha's response and do it's best.

Yeah, it accompanies the response with it's boilerplate caveat which is meaningless fluff. It's also not pointing out any of the actual issues with why its response is utter nonsesense.

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Why is converting U-238 to KCALs nonsensical? It's just different units of energy. I've wondered before how much energy a power plant creates in terms of how much a person uses per day, seems like an interesting thought to me.

You can't eat it.

GPT-4 has the social awareness to figure out what question the user is actually asking, which is:

"If humans had the ability to perfectly extract energy from gasoline/nuclear fuel then how much would we need to survive a week?"

Saying "no you can't eat gasoline" would be a pointlessly pedantic answer.

Your analogy is different from the situation we're presented with here. The question I answered is why converting to kcal is nonsensical. Yes it's just a different unit but... Kcal is nowadays used for things you eat (and exercise because it makes sense to use the same unit), it doesn't really make sense to convert radioactive material to that unit.

Converting from MeV to kcal is not nonsensical, both are units of energy. They are just conventionally used in different contexts.

For example, it is not 'nonsensical' to ask for the distance to the nearest shop in angstroms, but it would be unusual.

Well I understood it in a very different way, and I was impressed by this exercise. I don't care about the caveats or warnings about obvious things such as not eating uranium, I care that ChatGPT is getting better at producing accurate calculations.

Here's the non-sensical part — it's using the energy per fission of U-235. U-238 releases energy at a rate of 4 MeV at a half life of 4.468 billion years. That won't decay fast enough or energetically enough to sustain you unless your stomach is breeding fast neutrons — I think it's like 0.0000001646 dietary Calories per day.

Everything about it non-sensical, even ChatGPT knows that. If you ask it to calculate how long it can sustain you on radioactivity alone it could also calculate that, but this is the more interesting calculation in my opinion.

There's a logical disconnect in this jump though:

> Uranium-238 (U-238) is a radioactive isotope that releases energy through the process of radioactive decay. The energy content of uranium-238 can be calculated based on its energy release per fission event.

U-238 almost never decays by fission, but boy does this read like it would.

People really do try to shoot messengers to make themselves feel better.

The vibe I got was that Wolfram wasn’t capable of answering the question directly, so it got the answer indirectly by using a different calculation.

Wolfram alpha first told it converting the energy content of U-238 to food calories was undefined.

So chatgpt decided to get wolfram alpha to tell it the energy content of U-238 if it were to be completely nuclear fissioned. It then states that was the food equivalent. There's so many logical failures.

Sure, the prompter was probably hoping for that response, but it's insane.

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