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Comment by IKLOL | Hacker News Reader

How much is it actually using the PDF and how much is just normal Chat GPT knowledge? I uploaded a KJV bible and it seems to be doing pretty good with theological issues, like it knows salvation is by grace through faith alone which is my litmus test for any theological program. However, it seems to be just as honed in as Chat GPT is without even uploading a PDF.

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Try asking plain GPT-4 for a Bible verse in Greek. It will recite it for you accurately from memory.

I recommended a friend who is an engineer-turned-Catholic-priest take a look at it, and he was quite impressed with its ability to answer theological and philosophical questions; as well as its ability to explain the grammar of the Latin translation of a Bible verse (which it had recited from memory).

All that to say: I don't think you needed to feed it the KJV. :-)

It's clear that ChatGPT is used as the foundation model and that Chat PDF did some prompt engineering to make it focus on the contents of the PDF primarily. I uploaded a government form for family expense reimbursement, and then asked Chat PDF what the capital of France was. Its answer: "I'm sorry, but the answer to your question is not relevant to the content of this PDF file. However, the capital of France is Paris."

Rejoice!

I went with a paper[^1] from the other camp, and although it did a good job of summarizing it, it was not good at answering specific questions, e.g. the type of proteins that were common in Asgard archea and eukariotes.

But to me, a tool like this has to be one of the coolest applications of ChatGPT.

[^1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.04.429862v1....

I think maybe it has the data of the bible (and some theology and religion knowledge) already during its training. And these are the background for it to handle other texts. We should test it with some unique information, preferably different from common sense.

If you look carefully at Paul’s writings, you will notice that he never says that our righteousness comes from faith alone—only that it comes from faith apart from works.

Might need to wait for gpt5 for it to go more deeply into the topic :)

There is justification before God and justification before men. To be justified before God requires faith alone, to be justified before men requires faith and works. Justification before God = entrance into heaven, however, so works don't matter for salvation.

If we want Christians fellowship on this Earth, and rewards in heaven, it is good to do work.

I uploaded a 60-page PDF and asked it to summarize specific sections by calling out the section name, and it did a rather good job there.

The prompt likely is tuned to avoid making statements not supported by the PDF content.

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