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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I've consistently had issues with while using AI is graphs. If I ask it to put some simple function, it produces a really weird image that has nothing to do with the graph I want. It will be a weird swirl of lines and words, and it never corrects itself no matter what I say to it.

Has anyone had any luck with this? It seems like the only thing that it just can't do.

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You're doing it wrong. It can't produce proper graphs with it's diffusion style image generation.

Ask it to produce graphs with python and matplotlib. That will work.

And works very well - it made me a nice general "draw successively accurate Fourier series approximations given this lambda for coefficients and this lambda for the constant term". PNG output, no real programming errors (I wouldn't remember if it had some stupid error, I'm a python programmer). Even TikZ in LaTeX isn't hopeless (although I did ending up reading the tikz manual)

Ask it to plot the graph with python plotting utilities. Not using its image generator. I think you need a ChatGPT subscription though for it to be able to run python code.

You seem to get 2(?) free Python program runs per week(?) as part of the 01 preview.

When you visit chatgpt on the free account it automatically gives you the best model and then disables it after some amount of work and says to come back later or upgrade.

Just install Python locally, and copy paste the code.

Shouldn’t ChatGPT be smart enough to know to do this automatically, based on context?

It was, for a while. I think this is an area where there may have been some regression. It can still write code to solve problems that are a poor fit for the language model, but you may need to ask it to do that explicitly.

The agentic reasoning models should be able to fix this if they have the ability to run code instead of giving each task to itself. "I need to make a graph" "LLMs have difficulty graphing novel functions" "Call python instead" is a line of reasoning I would expect after seeing what O1 has come up with on other problems.

Giving AI the ability to execute code is the safety peoples nightmare though, wonder if we'll hear anything from them as this is surely coming

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