Even if it could, it would be an order of magnitude more inefficient in terms of convenience than the stopwatch we already have on our phones.
“Hey ChatGPT, do the thing I could have done in 3-4 clicks on my clock app.”
Not to mention the sheer wastefulness in terms of energy. A MINECRAFT REDSTONE MACHINE TIMER WOULD BE MORE EFFICIENT. (Not to mention that, unlike SOTA LLMs, it can run offline on a phone)
He’s going to ask US Congress for a bailout with taxpayers money when this all fails and Congress is going to most likely give it to him because this one company is a huge part of the US economy
Everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist over nothing here.
Of course an AI can track time, if it’s given access to a timer MCP server.
Can we track time without tools, just in our heads? Certainly not very accurately. We can, however, track it reasonably accurately if given access to a quartz stop watch (typically +/-15 s/year)
A language model is based around language and reasoning by words/symbols. It’s not a surprise it doesn’t have timing capability.
What Altman SHOULD be embarrassed about is that the model lies about its capabilities. That implies that the context is still not right - it should be adequately trained and given context to prevent the lying. That implies a much more worrying issue - and something that Anthropic handles far better, IMHO (when asked if it can track time, if says “no, not on my own”, and then proceeds to build a JavaScript timer that it offers up to track time).
I don’t use them but I follow the news about them loosely. The reason for this is epistemic humility. Claude has a pretty good idea of what its capabilities are and where the ceiling is. Chatgpt has no clue what its limits are so it believes it can do everything. Basically chatgpt has a lot of info and no idea where the gaps live and Claude has a fair idea when to search or use some external function to handle something. Gemini has less than Claude but more than chatgpt. Grok has little to no epistemic humility, but it did manage to accurately portray Musk as a world champion piss drinker, something none of the others were able to do.
I say that, but it’s been a few months since I looked. That could have changed because shit moves fast. By the looks of what it’s trying to do with the timer chatgpt has less than it used to. Possibly because of the way the model is trained to be helpful and confident.
It could simply save a timestamp of the “begin timer” message and compare it to the timestamp of the “end” message. It’s not that complicated, and writing a script and executing it is overkill… It just needs access to a calculator skill.
Yes, it handles it better, but it’s still a dumb approach and waste of energy.
You would already be doing a great service to the world if you produced a really well tuned search engine / information digger with LLMs but no you had to periodically hype it as AGI because it can memorize entire text books with some accuracy. You did this to yourselves and if you fall it will be because of these expectations which are not met.
Wow, the only thing Siri is generally competent at.
My first thought as well, lol.
Lol. Why dont they ask the AI how to program an AI?
Yo dawg I heard you like AI so we put an AI in your AI so it can AI while you AI!
They should just vibe code the feature. They’ll have it done in an afternoon, right?
The public fundamentally misunderstands this tech because salesman lied to them. An LLM is not AI. It just says the most likely thing based off what is most common in its training data for that scenario. It can’t do math or problem solve. It can only tell you what the most likely answer would be. It can’t do function things. It’s like Family Feud where it says what the most people surveyed said.
Some of them will “do math” but not with the LLM predictor, they have a math engine and the predictor decides when to use it. What’s great is when it outputs results, it’s not clear if it engaged the math engine or just guessed.
when it outputs results, it’s not clear if it engaged the math engine or just guessed
That depends on the harness though. In the plain model output it will be clear if a tool call happened, and it depends on the application UI around it whether that’s directly shown to the user, or if you only see the LLM’s final response based on it.
I explain it as asking 100 people to Google something and taking the most common answer.
Yeah, that’s basically exactly what family feud does.
Yep but instead of “name something a woman keeps in her purse” it’s “write my legal document” or “is it ok to lick a lamp socket”
I know Lemmy hates AI with a fiery passion (and I too hate it for various reasons), but the ability to make this sort of prediction in a way far more stable than whatever else came before with natural language processing (fancy term of the day for those who havem’t heard of it), and however inefficiently built and ran it is, is useful if you can nudge it enough in a certain direction. It can’t do functional things reliably, but if you contain it to only parse human language and extract very specific information, show it in a machine-parsable way, and then use that as input for something you can program, you’ve essentially built something that feels like it can understand you in human language for a handful of tasks and carry out those tasks (even if the carrying out part isn’t actually done by an LLM). So pedantically, it’s not AI, but most people not in tech don’t know or care about the difference. It’s all magic all the way down like how computers should just magically do what they’re thinking of. That’s not changed.
My point though, and this isn’t targeting you specifically dear OC, is that we can circlejerk all we want here, but echoing this oversimplification of what LLMs can do is pretty irrelevant to the bigger discourse. Call these companies out on their practices! Their hypocrisy! Their indifference to the collapse of our biosphere, human suffering, letting the most vulnerable to hang high and dry!
Tech is a tool, and if our best argument is calling a tool useless when it’s demonstrably useful in specific ways, we’re only making a fool of ourselves, turning people away from us and discouraging others from listening to us.
But if your goal is to feel good by letting one out, please be my guest.
Peace
We already have tools that can give us incorrect answers in natural human language.
And they post their videos to youtube for free.
Odd because home assistant can use a local run LLM to do so?
Beacuse they probably work as agents so they dont count themselfs. They use another app to do . Chat gpt probably could also do thay if integrated properly with your phone software.
It’s the Elon strategy. Works just right when the most powerful country of the world if full of people who can’t read at 6th grade level and a bunch of psychopaths.
Just make Codex write the code for it. Should be easy. Don’t even need humans. Right?
Okay, so, in case the headline is confusing anyone else, it’s literal. Like, you know how there are those cringe-ass Alexa ads that are about how it does AI language processing and assistant shit? Yeah, ChatGPT can’t I guess.
It seems out of scope for the tool, IMHO.
