No. of Recommendations: 14
/Start of rant
I continue to be amazed about how bad the current AI is, even Perplexity.ai
If you ask questions about topics for which there is layperson confusion, expecting expert clarification, it confidently replies with layperson confusion.
I asked about how adjusted prices are calculated, and why it's calculated that way. It confidently gave a wrong answer.
I mentioned in another post that when I asked it to explain Buffett's "five groves", it confidently and incorrectly replied that it's five fundamental ratios, P/E, P/B, etc.
I've mentally noted about four other cases.
The point in common is that these are topics that non-experts find confusing, and so there are lots of wrong answers to train on.
Bottom line: until things are fixed, the natural language processing implementation of "AI" is basically wandering down to the village to ask random villagers for answers, and there are more village idiots than experts.
The danger is that popular misconceptions will only get amplified by current AI.
Fixes:
Some fixes are cheap and require no re-training. For example, even if e.g. reddit is used in current training, just filter the output so that perplexity.ai doesn't reference reddit and similar sites in its output. A more expensive fix is to retrain using only reputable input sources. It is not hard to come up with a list of reputable sources for either filtering current output or for retraining, I asked perplexity.ai to do that and its list was perfectly fine.
Where AI will shine:
In contrast to NLP, which has the 'village idiot' problem, AI's that use real world data for input, such as video, sound, radar, touch input, for self-learning autonomous navigation and similar tasks is not subject to the 'village idiot' problem. Learning to read x-rays, CT scans etc is not subject to the village idiot problem. Learning to fold proteins and solving other scientific tasks is not subject to the village idiot problem.
Running/debugging code generated by an AI is not subject to the village idiot problem. The loop where you ask it for code, then you run it and it fails, then you ask the AI to debug it and the code runs, is quite frustrating. Have AI run the code and give you debugged code. Regarding the latter, there are concerns about having AI actually run code. You could "air gap" the sandbox it uses to test code. That may not perfect, nor are e.g. BSL-4 labs, but you make it as perfect as you can.
Here's a simple one: have AI replace RTFM.
Example: I'm learning to use Lightroom, a commercial photo processing software, and when I need to know how to do something I ask perplexity.ai instead of RTFM or watch youtube tutorials (actually, the latter is helpful for a global over-view, but often you just want to know "how do I do X?" and get the right answer immediately. Perplexity.ai does that). I'd kill for a voice interface (but have the response be in text as well as voice)! perplexity.ai is working with SoundHound to develop an advanced voice recognition system for mobile devices to work in noisy situation, cars etc. "Give me four good medium price restaurants near me" might be nice in a car, but the market for replacing RTFM with AI using voice recognition in the quiet environment of your desktop or laptop could be huge.
/End of rant
