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Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

I think complaints like this show just how amazing AI is getting. This person really expected that ChatGPT would single-shot give them this obscure recipe that took them a ton of effort to find themselves. Current AI can do so much, that people lament that it can't do everything. It is incredible to me when people bring up bad AI generated legal fillings... like people actually expect it to already to all of the work of an attorney, without error.

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It's like that old joke about one person being amazed at someone's dog being able to sing, and the other person says "it's not that impressive, he's pitchy" or something. Computers can finally think, and we're annoyed they can't think better than us.

I think of it more as "dancing bear ware". If you've ever seen a dancing bear, you wouldn't say it's particularly good at dancing. You may even say it's hardly dancing at all. But we don't care that it dances well; it's amazing that it dances at all.

Current AI is a dancing bear. It gives us the feeling of understanding language, semantics, logic and reason, but when you look closely, you realize it's doing a very poor job of it in a way that suggests it is just mimicking those things without actually being capable of them.

But as opposed to a dancing bear, we expect AI to get better and better at dancing in the next decades.

The speculation is important, it both changes the perspective for prospective companies/investors, and cannot even be said at this point to be unfounded.

Except for a dancing bear is useless. I get a ton of real world use out of GPT-4 that no other kind of product in this world can do.

It's not that it can't do everything. It's that it pretends it can do everything.

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