They continue to use AI for math (asking LLMs to split bills, for example) and treat its responses for factual data lookup as 100% reliable and correct.
Ah, yes, high tech solutions for low tech problems. Let's use the word machine for this number problem!
You know, that's a thought process that makes internal sense.
You have someone who's terrible at math. They want something else to do math for them.
Will they prefer to use a calculator, or a natural language interface?
How do you use a calculator without knowing what you're doing?
I've tried to explain it in those terms as well: every medium-sized prompt on these large models consumes roughly one phone battery charge worth of energy. You have a phone with a calculator.
I'd ask them to do the math on how much energy they're wasting asking stupid things of these systems, but I'm too afraid they'd ask ChatGPT to do the math.
The energy consumption per prompt will decrease for the same task complexity, as inference hardware gets better (as they already have from the 2023 paper that reported 3Wh).
I don't do this but isn't it basically... fine? I assume all the major chatbots can do this correctly at this point.
The trick here is that chatbots can do a wide range of tasks, so why context switch to a whole different app for something like this? I believe you'll find this happening more frequently for other use cases as well.
Usability trumps all.
When it comes to facts that actually matter, people need to know to verify the output.