25 July 2023
Recently, there has been a large interest in AI, a.k.a. A.I. a.k.a. Artificial Intelligence. Note the capitalization of both letters – seems important in some professions to differentiate Artificial Intelligence from a pale-throated sloth. But I digress. I’m a big fan of AI and I see a lot of potential in its uses for many different business problems. As with many new-on-the-scene technologies, the capabilities can be skewed by the press while we as consumers are left to find the boundaries. One such boundary is that the popular language model that is good for words (think Chat-GPT or Bing Chat) may not be good at everything. For example, mathematical calculations.
That’s not a huge surprise to the people that maintain the AI platforms we interact with. But it is a new item to consider for the average user. For instance, if you try to get chat-GPT to calculate complex math problems, you’ll often get incorrect answers. One study pegged that number at 2% accuracy after a few months. What made it more interesting is that the accuracy started at 98% and dropped to 2% in that study. Reddit has been abuzz with several funny comments regarding the accuracy “surprise”. In one thread, the poster had asked how many geese could fit in Lake Meade and purports the answer to be 716,561,924,472 geese.
AI is a great tool with a lot of promise. But as with any tool, know the capabilities before you make dire predictions or invest in the technology. Some fun articles:
The long version of the study is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09009.pdf
A shorter version can be found here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/over-just-few-months-chatgpt-232905189.html
Oh, and is that really the number of geese that can fit in Lake Meade? Hard to trust that is accurate, right?