Google snippet claims no countries in Africa starting with K | Hacker News Reader

Google snippet claims no countries in Africa starting with K

google.com

29 pointsshadowtree10 comments

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This seems to come from a joke, which some (AI-generated?) sites take literally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/o8i3as/fun_fact_...

AI will be defeated with sarcasm.

Hm, maybe. The ChatGPT prompt was:

> Did you know that there is no country in Africa that starts with the letter "k"?

I think in a case like this, the LLM is inclined to try to "yes, and" the prompt and generate some nonsense agreeing with it. That Reddit thread doesn't contain anything about a "K" sound.

Anyway, Google's snippets have always contained a lot of garbage, but pulling from ChatGPT transcripts definitely won't help.

I doubt it. I've tried to trick GPT4 into accepting invalid proofs, it wouldn't accept them. I told it a textbook said so, it said "sorry, the text book must be wrong". I finally gave it the correct proof and it accepted it. This was a proof that C(A) = C(AA^T) in linear algebra. The proof was not too hard, but depends on solid logical reasoning. GPT did well here, able to discriminate valid and invalid proofs.

I feel like it hurts ChatGPT when the training set contains many variations of explaining the same logical fact and/or proof. Which might be wrong, it sounds paradoxical at least.

Levels of abstraction differ, and terminology too. And of course there's content on the web that's just wrong, often in some subtle detail.

Example: I had a lengthy discussion with it about a school mathematics question and probabilities.

The question was clearly defined and every time the answer was ambiguous or not a valid proof, I tried to point out the inconsistencies to the best of my limited knowledge.

The question was

  What is the **expected** number of rolls needed to roll the first six using a fair 6-sided dice? Prove your answer.

I know this is a simple and innocent question, but it can trap one up when mathematical knowledge is limited (I include myself here, my education is just too rusted).

In this case, it came up with lots of hand-wavey answers on why the answer is 6.

The answer was correct but the explanations were not. Altering the question, for example by asking for at least two times the number six made things worse.

It took a lot of follow-up questions, then the model explained to me why the terms of the expansion of the recurrence equation it came up are bounded by a geometric series.

The correct answers were very good, precise and understable, but interspersed with misleading inconsistent, and wrong answers.

I wonder if it will break completely at some point for this kind of conversation, when it keeps ingesting content of unpredictable quality.

Google is such an embarrassing product. All that money and resources and this is the best they can do?

Works okay for me. I get a feature snippet saying:

"Kenya is located on the eastern coast of Africa and borders Somalia to the northeast, Tanzania to the north, Uganda to the west, South Sudan to the northwest, Ethiopia to the southwest, and Somalia again on the southern border"

with "Kenya" highlighted.

Links to spammy looking site https://www.redlinels.com/countries-that-start-with-k-countr...

The "people also ask" snippets seem to be garbage pretty often as well.

All countries starting with 'I' lie approximately on a line (great circle): Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Iraq, Iran, India, Indonesia.

Note that Ivory Coast starts with 'C' (in French).

When Chat GPT content attacks.

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