4mo ago

Bing says Alpha Centauri is 13.6 kilometers from us

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129 comments

I thought this was fake or a bad result or something, but totally just duplicated it. Wow.
If you read the block of text…. It doesn’t make sense either.
- I expect if you follow the references you'd find one of them to be one of those "if Earth was a grain of sand" analogies.
  People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.
  
  It's in the quote that they scaled it.
  The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn't resemble intelligence in any way, it isn't actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
  Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a "banana for scale" analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
- I just tried and got "about 40,000 billion kilometers". Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue
  AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what's accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways
  
  the loaded die at the end that chooses one of the llm's answers happened to land on a good word

A great deal of energy, hardware and software went into providing that wrong answer.
- We should leave AI to the realm of producing fringe/impossible porn, like it was meant for and like what everyone actually wants from it. All this "search engine" stuff is just cover like when you buy some non-lube products like groceries along with the tube of astroglide at 1:00 AM.
  
  You. I like you.
- If you read the whole thing, it's not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context
  
  What you’re referring to as “highlighting” here is what most of us consider the thing “answering the question”.
  “Where are you from?”
  “Connecticut. I was born and raised in Utah …”
  That first sentence is the answer to the question.

You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
- The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 8.
  (...)
  ”Space,” it says, ”is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen . . . ” and so on.
  
  In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
- Space is small. You just won't believe how itsy, bitsy, mind-bogglingly tiny it is. I mean, you may think it's long way to the fridge, but that's just peanuts to space
  
  Space is small.
  The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.

Like every tool, it has its uses...but they are not those being advertised. LLMs are great for things where mistakes don't detract from the result (or even add to it) like brainstorming, art, music, disinformation...all that good stuff.
- That's what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don't have right or wrong answers.
  Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?
  
  @Gsus4 @btaf45 That's true for AI that has been trained for the general public to provide an answer for any provided question meaning they are forced to respond to a prompt even though they are wrong and maybe even know they are wrong. They just don't know the answer and can't say that because it's commercially bad.
  I do believe that for scientific research AI models are much more precise because they have been trained with the right datasets and are tasked with answering specific questions.
- Yeah that's why it would be very nice if they would stop integrating it into fucking search engines.
  
  They wanna fucking integrate it in everything, dumbfucks. This is why meritocracy is dead, the people with the means to determine where we go as a society are "number go up" people.
- Ah, but mistakes could detract from disinformation if it's mistakenly correct!
- brainstorming
  Sure thing, but have to remember to include "no bad ideas" in the prompt for best results.
  
  that's the point of brainstorming, all ideas are allowed, filter later.

That's a big fucking problem if true. Albeit a short lived problem.

Have you gone 13.6 km up there to verify it's not there?
- 13.6km is 44,619ft.
  So nearly every time one flies commercial, yes, since cruising altitude is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I think a large triple-star system would be quite visible at that point.
  
  I imagine if you were 13.6 km from a star you would either burn up or fall into the star's gravity well.
  
  That's high. I didn't know they went that far up.

AI is statistically generated word salad.
- Yah I'm so happy every major internet and tech company is deciding to deliberately power every system we use with random word salad generators, there's no chance will cause any problems.
- it's like having Sarah Palin for dinner!
- So is human speech
  
  No it fucking isn't lol

In very next line, it says the distance is 4.37 lightyears away... which is also wrong, lol
For anyone wondering, the actual correct answer is about 4.25 lightyears or about 40 trillion kilometers.
- These are all equally confusing. How many American football fields?
  
  In scientific terms? An absolute fuck-ton of football fields.
  
  Approximately 437,445,319,335,083 of those.
  
  One football field is about a hectometer and there are 10 hectometers per kilometer. So 415 trillion.
- Close. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion kilometers) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.

Relying on LLM for any facts without verifying is playing with fire.
- I suspect there’s a quite-overlapping Venn diagram of people who rely on LLMs for their “facts” with people who believe the earth is flat and people who believe ancient aliens are real.

So really no excuse when the vogons come
- There's no excuse anyway. The plans were very prominently displayed.
  
  On display? I finally found them in the bottom of a locked filling cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the leopard".

Forgive Bing. It’s American and doesn’t know the metric system.

I’m burrrrning!

wormholes confirmed
- Stargate is a documentary.

It's measuring the distance to your nearest copy of Sid Myers alpha centari

Good golly, someone make some chocolate chip cookies, we're going to have to go and welcome them to the neighborhood. Damn rude no one said anything sooner.

13.6 kilometers ought to be enough for anybody.

Hey, I have a half tank of gas, I think I will go check it out.
- It’s ~~126 miles to Chicago~~ 13.6 kilometers to Alpha Centauri, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack off cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.
  
  get in
- I'll be the non jokey one here and bring us all down with the hard math. 13.6 kilometers converted into American is pretty much, like, way more than a half tank of gas unless you have a Prius. But you do you. Can you get me a slushie on the way back? You know I'm good for it.

Well then, what are we waiting for? Let's go visit Alpha Centauri!

When techbros said "you can type a question and the AI will answer", they seem to have forgotten that we expect the answers to be true and accurate.
And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.
- And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.
  This is the main reason why AI cannot be trusted to answer science questions. They absolutely need a database of facts.
  
  And it’s a reason AI cannot be trusted. Full stop.
  Perhaps in 50-100 years after people stop being stupid about it.

I have a copy of the Alpha Centauri game about 13.6 meters from me.
- Do you have tips for someone used to newer Civ games? I know I played Civ2 as a kid, which should be similar, but I only remember back to 3 and only clearly back to 4. I tried AC and had difficulty just figuring out basic controls.

Like, are we sure? Has someone actually checked?
- Yeah, some nerds won't shut up about their fake numbers

That's why it's been so gosh darn hot.

41.5 petameters.
Nobody using the metric system says "trillion kilometers"! 🌞
- He literally told it to give the answer "in km". That's on him, not Bing.
- 41.5 petameters.
  https://coco1453.wordpress.com/thinking-in-metric-for-astronomy/
  Nobody using the metric system says “trillion kilometers”!
  Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because 'kilometer' is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see "trillion kilometers" I convert that in my head to "quadrillion meters" which I then convert to "petameters".
  I would rather see the base unit 'meters' than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:
  metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units
  
  Hmm now that I read that article I was thinking about the poor computers who all run on power of 2. What we really should do is switch to base 1024 instead. It makes sense to optimize for the true representation of numbers in these spacecraft.
  36.86 pebimeters. Lets make it happen! 🤣

Yes, but it feels longer with all the traffic jams.

That explains why it's so hot outside.

So close, yet so far...as once Elvis said

Interstellar travel is possible after all

It knows the distance from Earth, but that’s not what the question was. It’s 13.6 km from somewhere.

Who's down for a quick bike ride?

Maybe Bing has access to the Event Horizon's portal tech. It would explain a lot.

The 4th dimension shortcut

Now that's an explanation for Global Warming that I haven't heard before!
- GOP gonna take this and run with it.

How have scientists not figured out interstellar travel yet??? It's really right in front of us!
- They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out.
  For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

From something like this?
If Earth were the size of a sand grain, this distance would be about the width of a hair in contrast to the corresponding 6-mile (10-km) distance to Alpha Centauri in the same scale.

Alpha Centauri is actually 13.6 feet from me, Ive got an old sid meyrs disk somehwere in the box of old tech stuff. Great game, used the same engine as Civ 2, think its on GOG these days.

I wonder if Bing over- or under-estimates the wealth of Bill Gates.

Too close for comfort.

Ahhhh, yeah
MKBHD wave form sound board.

Perhaps you have asked a flat-earther AI /s

Bada Bing

It propably grabbed the info off some random number-confusing dude like me, who recently posted the Earth's diameter would be about 6 km instead of 6000.
Edit: oops, did it again. Meant radius, not diameter...

Huh. The collision must've happened a lot sooner than we thought.

google > bing

Microsloth is ignorant as hell to push that9

Ok, lightyears, but i think the number is right?

129 comments