Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veuxdo | Hacker News Reader

> This doesn't really seem like an AI problem

It can be many problems, but I think it is certainly an AI problem. A big one. It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentaly a bad idea. Computers are for, well, computing. They are not for answering history questions or whatever.

View on HN

“ Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Straight from the horse’s mouth :)

But Gemini is offering opinions and analysis (and they're often pretty terrible, to boot). It seems they've wandered pretty far afield from their mission.

> It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentally a bad idea

No, that is not what it shows at all. Everything you do on a computer is "asking a computer for something." Do you think computers are computing things that no one asked for?

They're computing things they've precisely been programmed to compute. Number crunching, in the end, with extremely low error rates caused by hardware faults. LLM error rates are comparatively astronomical.

On the one hand I want to agree with this, but on the other hand, it seems like a short-sighted view. Imagine if earlier people had told themselves "computers aren't for making music", "computers aren't for connecting with friends", "computers aren't for watching movies", etc. Computers can be whatever we want them to be for, we just need to figure out how.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com