Might not be the worst way to explain how GPS works, but definitely up there.

You'd be better off just saying "it uses satellites and stuff".

> About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception.

I think that's one of the biggest problems with using LLMs for accurate answers. A lot of the text that's very useful for modelling human language and questions is also full of factual errors and questionable opinions. Answers being wrong is a problem with old-fashioned web search too, but I think LLMs necessarily lean more on quantity rather than quality of content...

It is better at doing "translations" from one "language" to another "language". While it does know stuff and can answer questions about what it knows, that isn't its strength.

If you can do "here is the structured data, summarize it and make sure to present this information" it can do that quite well.

So far I've played with GPT doing a zero shot classification of HN titles and CSV hourly weather data to summary. In each case, it has done quite well.

Neither of those are things about what it "knows."

The benefit of web searches, and trouble with LLMs, is you can see the site that an answer is on and judge the credibility based on that. If I see that the answer is on Reddit ELI5, then I know that there's no assurance about how accurate the answer is. If it takes me to a page for a university engineering or math department, or the blog of a dude who built a receiver, then I can be a lot more confident that the answer is correct, though it might be technically over my head.