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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

> Language models are mathematical, statistical beasts. The beast generally doesn't do well with open ended questions (known as "zero-shot"). It shines when you give it something to work off of ("one-shot").

That is the usage that is advertised to the general public, so I think it's fair to critique it by way of this usage.

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Yeah, the "you're using it wrong" argument falls flat on its face when the technology is presented as an all-in-one magic answer box. Why give these companies the benefit of the doubt instead of holding them accountable for what they claim this tech to be? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bBfYX8X5aU

I like to ask these chatbots to generate 25 trivia questions and answers from "golden age" Simpsons. It fabricates complete BS for a noticeable number of them. If I can't rely on it for something as low-stakes as TV trivia, it seems absurd to rely on it for anything else.

Whenever I read something like this I do definitely think "you're using it wrong". This question would've certainly tripped up earlier models but new ones have absolutely no issue making this with sources for each question. Example:

https://chatgpt.com/share/69160c9e-b2ac-8001-ad39-966975971a...

(the 7 minutes thinking is because ChatGPT is unusually slow right now for any question)

These days I'd trust it to accurately give 100 questions only about Homer. LLMs really are quite a lot better than they used to be by a large margin if you use them right.

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