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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

As a math teacher, this is such a funny comparison to keep reading.

Yes, there's a difference between a deterministic outcome and a non-deterministic one. But throw humans into the loop, and it becomes more interesting. I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. And it's not just students; as a teacher I've always paid attention to how adults use math.

With calculators or GPT tools, or any other automated assistant, judgement and validation continues to matter.

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> I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator.

Answers from calculators are always right! But the human may have asked the wrong question.

There are a bunch of well-known areas where popular calculators tend to give incorrect answers: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/resources/example...

It’s mostly fine until it isn’t. AI will probably operate in the same capacity. We already have so much incorrect information out there that’s part of our pop culture. Even down to things like the fact that Darth Vader never said, “Luke, I am your father,” and Mae West never said, “Why don’t you come see me sometime?”

Even basic movie quotes are beyond our ability to get right. Hilariously, I just asked ChatGPT about these quotes and it explained that these are common misquotes, told me what was actually said in these movies, and explained some relevant context.

Sherlock never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson” even once in the books. Kirk never said, “Beam me up, Scotty.” We’re much less correct than we like to think. And somehow we’ve survived.

ChatGPT is fallible just like we are. We’ll manage, just like we always have.

I have another theory about all those quotes. Regarding that Darth Vader quote, if quoted exactly, i.e. "I am you father", it isn't immediately obvious the quote is from Star Wars. "Luke" gives you a context. Sherlock and Kirk quotes are synthesized from what the characters actually said, and arguably the precise wording doesn't matter, because the point of the quote is to bring up images of the characters and situations, not of those specific words.

Go type .1*.2 into any JavaScript console.

Edit: slapping a few more in here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

https://daviddeley.com/pentbug/index.htm

The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer. The user did not specify a level of precision, and web browsers are programmed to use a precision level which is reasonable under most circumstances. If the user needs a higher level of precision, he or she needs to specify that as part of the question (such as by not using floating point numbers).

I don't mean to be pedantic. I teach coding to elementary school students, and this is something fundamental I try to make them understand. A computer will always do what you tell it to do. A bug is when you accidentally tell a computer to do something different than what you'd intended.

Going back to the calculator example, if a student used a calculator and got the wrong answer, the problem didn't come from the calculator. This is useful to understand; it can help the student work backwards to figure out what did go wrong.

AI is different in that we've instructed the computer to develop and follow its own instructions. When ChatGPT gives the wrong answer, it is in fact giving the right answer according to the instructions it was instructed to write for itself. With this many layers of abstraction, however, the maxim that computers "always do what you tell them" is no longer useful. No human truly knows what the computer is trying to do.

> I don't mean to be pedantic.

I'm sorry in advance, but this reply is just to meet pedantry with pedantry.

> A computer will always do what you tell it to do.

This is the Bohr model of computers. It's the kind of thing you tell elementary school students because it's conceptually simple and mostly right, but I think we know better here on HN. Pedantically, computers don't always do what you tell them to, because the don't always hear what you tell them, and what you tell them can be corrupted even when they do hear it.

For instance, random particles from outer space can cause a computer to behave quite randomly: https://www.thegamer.com/how-ionizing-particle-outer-space-h...

  why was nobody able to pull it off, even when replicating exactly the inputs that DOTA_Teabag had used? Simple: this glitch requires a phenomenon known as a single-event upset, which is very much out of any player's control.

I don't think we can reasonably say that in this instance, the computer behaved according to what the user told it to do. In fact, it responded to the user and the environment.

That's true. An earlier version of my comment called out hardware problems as an exception—insufficient error correction for neutrino bit flips is fundamentally a hardware problem—but I removed it before posting. In a way, I feel hardware bugs do still follow this principle: The electrons in the circuits are behaving as they always do, just not in the way we intended. But I agree this gets philosophically messy—no one "programmed" the electrons.

My underlying point is that, at least in 99.999% of cases, the problem isn't the calculator, it's the human using the calculator incorrectly. And although you could draw some parallels between calculators and AIs with regard to selecting the right tool and knowing when and how to use it, I'd say the randomness involved in an LLM is fundamentally different.

I don't think it's fundamentally different, and I think you're conflating complexity with randomness.

>The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer.

It's wrong in the same way that saying 1/1 = 1.0004 is wrong. It's not a matter of chosen precision in that it doesn't make the answer correct when you increase the number of zeros between 1 and 4.

It makes it less wrong. For most calculations people do we don’t that very many digits of precision for any one calculation.

That's true. I think that it is analogous to the discussion of AI limitations. Both of these are tools and are not categorically exclusive.

In the case of translation of floating point numbers from base-2 to base-10 we have to make approximations which will often be slightly wrong forever without regard for amount of precision.

With AI, depending on the pre-conditions, the AI could be stuck in a state of being slightly wrong forever for a specific question without regard to further refinement of the query.

These are both still useful as tools. We just need to be able to work on the amount of refinement of the answer that the AI gives, which may be able to be solved fairly well through prompt engineering, if not through the advancement of GPT itself.

One deck is made of wood. One deck is made made of steel. They will behave differently after years of weathering.

Just because they are both both decks doesn't mean they are the same.

Are both useful in some context?

In the same way that nearly any two arbitrary objects are useful in some context.

From the perspective of an investor who just wants their stonks to go up, sure. From the perspective of a sailor who wants the deck to not crumble beneath their feet in a storm, no.

Answers from AI might not always be right and a human has to learn to judge them or refine their prompts accordingly. In either case there's a tool that a human must use and become savvy with.

<< Answers from calculators are always right! But the human may have asked the wrong question.

I actually agree with you, but, in the same vein, does it not mean that user did not ask correct prompt?

No they are not

Calculators have no hallucinations, LLMs do. They can literally say that 1+1 is not 2.

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