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Comment by abrax3141 | Hacker News Reader

If it was trained on CS textbooks, they weren't very good ones. I asked it (GPT4) to write a quantum computer algorithm to square a number. It very confidently told me that to simplify the problem it would use two bits. Okay, fine. But then the algorithm it (again confidently) implemented did a left shift (which it reminded me was multiplying by 2, so it definitely intended this!) and then add the number to itself. It then wrote that in terms of QC gates. Tada! It took me a half beat to realize that rather than this being some new version of squaring a number that I somehow wasn't aware of, it's completely wrong. It only works on 00! Confronted, of course it did the usual "So sorry... I guess I don't know how to do this." dance. I don't get why anyone thinks that this thing is worth anything at all, except for cheating on creative writing tests.

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Damn so you tried once to use it for a thing and it failed? That's crazy, truly a mystery then why so many devs continue to use it daily.

It's arguably the first useful general purpose AI. Claiming it is not worth anything at all because it can't solve a problem that 99.999% of humans would not be able to solve is a pretty ridiculous definition of 'worth'.

99.999% of humans who haven't seen the data.

If you had just spent 90 days observing the equivalent of millions of books what are the odds you could recall even one thing from each of them.

Zero.

You (and everyone else) is missing the point of my post. (I admit to having thrown it poorly.) Forget the QC part; It confidently described an algorithm to square a number, which literally any beginning CS student could do, that didn’t even come close.

I will admit to using it all the time for simple programming tasks, and it occasionally does them correctly. Often it comes close enough that I can fix them. (Interestingly in most of these cases I can’t talk it into fixing itself. It kinda gets into wrong-approach ruts), and sometimes it’s horribly wrong (like here).

I find the horribly wrong cases funny.

What percentile rank among college-educated Americans would that correspond to?

I'd guess that takes it out of the top 0.1%, but not the top 1%.

Call it 100 million college-educated Americans. I don’t think 100,000 people can formulate working quantum computing algorithms in ten seconds. It is probably closer to 0.001%, but those people probably can’t describe 13th century medical technology very well.

Surprisingly you need to be quite adept at 14th century medicine in order to write quantum algorithms

the tricky part is that the rest of that million college-educated folks would answer "I don't know", something LLMs really struggle at

A product that mostly declines to be a product doesn’t seem like it would sell very well.

I must be getting old, because GPT-4 is basically magic compared to what has come before... and just a few months in people are happily dunking on it.

It's an ego problem imo, some folks have a co-dependency problem with being "smart" and now GenAi took away their trophy

jquery is definitely old.

The dunking makes sense to me—“AI is taking our Jobs” is a real concern, so pointing out how bad ChatGPT is at coding on an arguably coding social network is one way to control the narrative.

1. I asked my child how to write a quantum computer algorithm to square a number and they didn't know. It's amazing that anyone thinks children are worth anything at all. I immediately sold mine to be harvested for organs and I suggest everyone else do the same.

2. I looked in The Art of Computer Programming for a quantum computer algorithm to square a number and it didn't have one. If it's a CS textbook it obviously isn't a very good one. In fact it's amazing that anyone thinks Knuth is worth anything at all. I immediately threw my copies in the recycling.

In fact you can divide everything into the set of things which know how to square a number on a quantum computer (let's call that the set of valuable things) and everything else. Everything else can be discarded.

It sounds like you don't know how to use it effectively is all I can see from your post.

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