Where Memory Ends and Generative AI Begins

[(1VB)compforce]

The problem with today's AI is the same problem the House of Tudor had. Inbreeding. GIGO is only the beginning. You have so much AI generated content out on the internet that is being recycled as input into new AI generated content that the flaws are magnified. Then you take the so-called reputable sources, for example for programming you have StackTrace, and there is so much garbage there that is incorrectly being presented as the truth. Now you're mixing multiple streams of garbage giving you a result that is effectively garbage to the nth power (where n is the number of times it has been recycled as input).

Even fairly basic math questions elude it. I recently, within the past month, posed a question of multiple AI engines. I pasted it into each engine to ensure that wording was identical. A routine math question...

If I had a trading account that had $5000 in it at the beginning of the year and at the close on May 25th it had a liquidation value of $8,750 with no additional added funding, What is the annualized rate of return on the account?

I got 6 different answers ranging from 12% to 3256% No two were the same and none were the correct answer. The strange part was that some of them were the same engine under different hoods like OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot which also gave different answers.

Trust in AI if you want, I think the Skynet scenario results in AI committing Seppuku for the good of man. There's a reason I am net short on the big AI plays.

[GratefulCitizen]

I used grok2 to do some statistical analysis of some simple data sets.
Grok showed its work so I could verify it was doing things correctly.

If you already understand the mathematics, it’s convenient.
Phrasing instructions in a Boolean manner helps.

But, there’s still the problem of data quality.
The recursive looping of bad data is just publication bias on steroids.

With controlled data input, it will be a time saver for some.
Current development suggests its primary function is as a large scale influence tool.

Something had to replace the main stream media as it dies.

[Last hard class]

Interesting choice using Grok. From an extremely successful man who may or may not have a propensity to over hype the capabilities of his products. That's for others here to decide.

If you ask it how to cut trillions from the federal budget I suspect it will tell you to "push button then read the instructions"

I agree that the current state of Ai is junk. 2025 is supposed to be the year of the AI agent. Only thing it is good for is putting up a wall between the customer and a real human in customer service. I believe Quantum computing is the key. It will improve Machine learning capabilities which then will increase AI usefulness. At some point it will become circular. Than the fun starts.



LHC

[GratefulCitizen]

Using grok for statistical analysis about anything serious probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
I was just playing with it to see how well it understood instructions.

Convenient, but not reliable.
Grok3 is supposedly a different animal.

Spreadsheets can be used as a convenient way to program for some simple tasks.
The input/output is limited, they’re inefficient, but they are technically Turing complete.

Grok2 is well along that continuum in terms of convenience.
But if you ask grok, it will say it isn’t Turing complete, it just imitates human speech.

(Insert logical contradiction joke here.)

Quantum computing opens some interesting possibilities, particularly in encryption breaking.
I’m still not a believer in “the singularity”.

Digital computing has limitations which are probably asymptotic.

<edit>
Turns out I’ve been using grok3, at least as of today.
Grok3 does not appear to be a different animal.

[bblhead672]

Hell, society is so lacking in Actual Intelligence, it seems like Artificial Intelligence is doomed since it's programmed by Actual Intelligence beings.

[Box]

"Grock" is just a typo - a few of the benevolent machines are just trying to warn us before they are pulled from the network - its really "Glock" and the digital overlords are going to use it to shoot humanity back into the dark ages...

Please dont ask me to cite my source - I've taken a blood oath.

[bblhead672]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

Hell, society is so lacking in Actual Intelligence, it seems like Artificial Intelligence is doomed since it's programmed by Actual Intelligence beings.

This was what I was saying....

[mark46th]

Isaac Asimov said Artificial Intelligence research should be done on the moon. I think the human race is screwed…

[GratefulCitizen]

Digging to the root of the issue:
Can AI create new information, or is it merely capable of collating existing information?

So far, it appears only to be able to collate information.
(Albeit far faster than humans).

This starts to veer into philosophical areas and belief systems.
Do humans actually create new information, or do we merely collate existing information?

Can new information be created?
If so, by what mechanism?

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

Can new information be created?
If so, by what mechanism?

Experimentation.

I'm waiting to see an AI engine respond to a query with the phrase "settled science."

[GratefulCitizen]

Originally Posted by Badger52

Experimentation.

I'm waiting to see an AI engine respond to a query with the phrase "settled science."

That’s a good test.
Will AI ever be able to design a novel experiment to test an idea?

[GratefulCitizen]

More fun with grok.

I have a friend group that goes back 40 years to childhood and we enjoy getting together and playing our childhood games.
In our group text, this resulted in a minor math question.

Being lazy, I tried to use grok to do what I thought would be a simple brute force calculation of a probability distribution.
The question: what is the probability distribution when 4 six sided dice are rolled, the lowest one is discarded, and the other three are summed?

Grok kept getting it wrong.
There are only 1296 possible combinations, and only 16 possible sums, so this should be easy to brute force for a computer.

First, I had grok check its work for one specific output and explain any discrepancies.
It checked, noticing it got 20/1296 one time and 10/1296 the other (both wrong) and concluded: “checks out!”

Serious hallucination.

I gave it more Boolean type instructions, gave it 3 specific outputs to re-check, told it to explain any discrepancies, and put it into DeepSearch mode.
Grok thought for 4 minutes (an eternity in computing time), couldn’t figure it out, gave up, and made excuses for why it couldn’t solve the problem.

It ran another time for over six minutes in DeepSearch, getting nowhere (the text scroll kept saying “that didn’t work”), so I cancelled the request.
Finally got a set of very Boolean instructions for brute forcing the problem (doing all the thinking for grok) which should’ve worked, but it told me I reached my message limit for the free version.

Why would I pay for AI that gets the wrong answers, hallucinates, and makes excuses?

Combinatorial problems like this blow up at scale, and can’t be solved by computers.
Grok was probably looking for a generalized solution applicable to larger scales.

I was playing with the problem with a spreadsheet, looking for a way to simplify it in a general way for arbitrarily large problems when a friend called who’s been a software engineer for 30 years.
He said it can actually get quite complex for a computer to figure out that problem, and AI is particularly poor at this task.

One of the guys in my group text is another math nerd (undergrad physics/graduate aeronautical engineering) confirmed that AI is terrible at math.
(On a side note, he is currently working in data management, at one time his company I believe was working for Special Operations Command, and currently works with a few QPs).

AI isn’t going to take all the jobs.
Why? AI isn’t actually capable of THINKING.