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Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

The same is true to some extent for cars (Ford/Benz). LLMs will even answer differently depending on the language the question is asked.

Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers:

Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird

Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.

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The only source that will respond Ford invented the car is a person who has no idea and is simply guessing the first name comes to mind. It can't really even be contested since Benz's and Ford's inventions are decades apart.

I've never been taught that Ford invented the car, but instead Ford invented the mass production of cars. Not really sure where "Ford invented car" comes from

I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.

Yeah, as an American I never was taught that Ford invented cars. He invented cheap cars.

He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.

Oldsmobile invented the assembly line for cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_E._Olds#Assembly_line

Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.

Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.

I'm not even sure I would compare ford to Jobs or Woz. Woz is a talented engineer. Jobs was a great product guy. I've always thought of Ford as process/production expert. The Model T wasn't a particularly great car compared to its competition. What made it and Ford succeed was his production process made it cheaper than the competition. But his processes also allowed him to make it faster and he came up with the franchise system which gave Ford national reach at a time when every other car maker was regional. The Model T wasn't just cheaper than the competition, in many parts of the country it was realistically the only car you could buy for awhile.

About Radio here in Brazil there is other one: Roberto Landell de Moura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

Thats actually more interesting that LLMs answer based on language questions are asked, I never thought to test that. It would be nice if we got to a point where you train an LLM to genuinely figure out these nuances and fix its own model.

Google, I suspect, would do the same, if you were in Texas coffee's origin would not get you the result that mentions Yemen, Ethiopia would be the first result. This is how I won a $100 bet with a Texan who insisted that google gave him Ethiopia. The trouble is, we were in the Middle East when asking google for the bet.

What? Even Ford Motor Company don't seem to claim that Ford made the first car. His Quadricycle was first ran in 1896, Benz's is from 1885...

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