Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...

I really was quite impressed with the depth of knowledge about various Actor systems, had by ChatGPT 4. But encyclopedic knowledge and connections between various islands of knowledge is not at all the same as really understanding a concept.

True AI should be able to creatively synthesize new knowledge, just like PhD candidates are expected to do. That kind of AI hasn’t yet arrived. And I doubt that exotic perceptron networks will ever get you there. 

But they make really useful interactive and conversational encyclopedias, as long as you know more about the subject than it appears to know. Otherwise, you will be suckered by opinion masquerading as fact, and hallucinations resulting from weak connections between unrelated islands of knowledge.

I haven’t yet seen hallucinations from ChatGPT nor Claude, in the short time I have been using them. But they pop up almost immediately in the AI Preamble of any Google Search.

- DM


> On Aug 7, 2025, at 13:44, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I actually started the day in a more conversational mode with ChatGPT, not code development. More like the way the Physicist Unzicker argues back and forth with it about fundamentals of physics, searching for the deeper origins of the Fine Structure Constant.
> 
> What I found was that its encyclopedic grasp of related topics was useful to me, in mentioning connections, like the exponential back-off algorithm for collision resolution. Of course, I knew about that algorithm, but I hadn’t given it any thought in the context of my Actors state mutation.
> 
> So that’s why I said it could be useful when you are alone and just staring at 4 walls. I’m sure that conversing with another knowledgeable human would be at least as productive. But those are hard to come by.
> 
> - DM
> 
> 
> 
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