ChatGPT isn't the right tool to use for checking if numbers are prime. It is tuned for conversations. I'd like to see a MathGPT or WolframGPT.

The real question is if ChatGPT is worse on math and better elsewhere, or just worse overall. That is still unknown

Interestingly enough, ChatGPT can generate Wolfram language queries.

> Can you give me a query in Wolfram language for the first 25 prime numbers?

> Prime[Range[25]]

> What about one for the limit of 2/x as x tends towards infinity?

> Limit[2/x, x -> Infinity]

Edited out most of the chatter from it for clarity.

> "ChatGPT isn't the right tool to use for checking if numbers are prime. It is tuned for conversations."

Two months ago they were telling me ChatGPT is coming for everyone - programmers, accountants, technical writers, lawyers, etc.

Now we're slowly back to "so here's the thing about LLMs"...

It's been well know from the start that these LLMs aren't optimized for math. I remember reading discussions when it came out.

You weren't paying attention.

That last sentence is pretty dismissive and unnecessary, maybe even outright mean. It's possible that the person you're replying to is simply not as deeply ingrained in the technical literature as you are, or has more demands on their time than you do.

It didn’t seem particularly mean to me.

And yet my Google engineer friend tells me to use Bard for my math coursework. I know it’s just an anecdote but what’s with the hype?

I was paying attention and it’s why I refuse to use LLMs for math, but I’m being told by people inside the castle to do so. So it is not so black and white in the messaging dept.

I have a tenured architect proposing that we stop sending structured data internally between two services (JSON) - and instead pass raw textual data spat out by an LLM which linguistically encodes the same information.

Literally nothing about this proposal makes sense. The loss of precision/accuracy (the LLM is akin to applying one-way lossy and non-deterministic encoding to the source data), the costs involved, efficiency, etc.

All just to tell everybody they managed to shove LLMs somewhere into the backend.

Don't lump me or the other skeptical voices in with those zealots.

Who were 'they'? The same people who were telling you you'd be zooming around a bitcoin-powered metaverse on your Segway, then having your self-driving car bring you back to your 3d-printed house to watch 3d TV?

There's a certain type of person who sees a new thing, and goes "this will change everything". For every new thing. Very occasionally, they're right, by accident. In general, it's safest to be very, very sceptical.

All the SP is saying is it used to be able to perform that task, and now it can't. That means it has changed. Whether it was ever the best tool to perform any task is open to debate.

I can't access the thread, as I don't have a Twitter account, so I can't assess the validity of the argument.

Well thanks for sharing your ignorance with us.

Here it is just for you: https://t.co/H6OWhUkzcW

Replace twitter.com with nitter.net in the url

Then why comment? I'm not trying to be an ass, but this is literally the only comment you've made in this thread. The linked article is a Twitter thread. If you don't have Twitter, fine, move on to the next thing you can actually comment on.

Person A offers a reason why we may want to be slightly more skeptical than normal about this information. Person B suggests we can pretty easily look past that. Person C (you) injects themselves in the conversation simply to say that they can't add anything to the conversation. The closest example I can think of that is equally cringe-inducing is two people talking about a show and an unasked third party leaning in to add, "well, I don't have a television so I can't comment."

I don't think the comment is unwarranted - it happened to me the other day: someone refers me to a particular Twitter post and I can't access it without a Twitter account. I don't know if it's a glitch or deliberate but it makes referring people to Twitter similar to referring them to Facebook posts (which is not really practiced on HN). Times change, I guess.

I do think it'd be nice if people mostly posted links that were accessible to the general public. At least paywalled articles usually have a link in the comments where they can be read. Many times tweets could even be pasted as text into a comment to make them accessible.

Twitter accounts are free and I think it takes about 60 seconds to make one, so for all intents and purposes a Twitter thread is publicly accessible.

Last I heard they required a phone number which isn't free. I even created a couple accounts a long time ago, but they were both banned after a week or so. I suspect because they thought they were bot accounts. I used free email services like yahoo to sign up, I only ever used the website and not the app, and I never posted or interacted with anything, I just followed a small number of accounts.