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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2059 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

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So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.

I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.

Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?

Which model was that? Instead of saying "well yeah use a better model", I thought I'd try to replicate it. So I just went to google.com in incognito and dropped in what is the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold, and it gave a good, accurate answer from it's AI, with a correct calculation and a link to the page it got the current price from. That's the regular Google search interface and no login, so it's got to be the most heavily cost-optimized model they operate.

I don't generally make a habit of trying to seek out the dumbest-possible AIs, and I know they're non-deterministic, but I haven't ever seen one make that kind of totally braindead error before.

The fact that AI may only generate these kinds of errors a small percentage of the time is only a reasonable argument when the comparison is with something that makes similar errors a greater percentage of the time. Writing a computer program that queries a database for commodity prices and gives the current values of a given quantity is trivial to write, and can be done relatively easily on a home computer from the 1980s. Despite the relatively low tech, it won't make mistakes very often, and when it does they will be in the form of the program crashing entirely, not misplacing a decimal point or giving a plausible but incorrect response. I have been using Excel for decades, and this has not been a problem. Even if the LLM output is only wrong one time in every thousand attempts, that's still immeasurably worse than our simple computer program. And then you add in the fact that you're making this calculation through a process that requires a billion-dollar offsite computer that cost untold billions to train to get an answer that is less reliable than from a pocket calculator given away for free at a bank, and people are going to look askance.

"But," you may say, "what you describe requires a separate program. The beauty of the LLM is that it can answer general purpose questions." Which is true, but if the error rate is too high, it still isn't particularly useful. In the commodity price example, if I actually need to know the price of 0.035 ounces of gold for business purposes, it's worth it for me to have a computer program designed for the purpose that will always give an accurate answer. If I don't, then I'm not paying for a technological solution, period.

Yeah I get the impression that a lot of AI power-users are using them precisely to write the deterministic programs that will give them more reliable answers than the AI.

(I've actually been specifically advised by an AI to do this, once.)

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