Basically I’ve being trying to sort a list of food by date. I took a rough note of each food and date and it gave it to ChatGPT and asked it to format and order it. It formatted it just fine but it couldn’t order it by date. Most of them were in the right place but there were a few out of place. For example at one point it gave me:
– 1st February 2024 – Cookies
– 1st March 2024 – Biscuits
– 1st June 2024 – Soup
– 3rd June 2024 – Chocolate
– 9th May 2024 – Chocolate
– 1st August 2024 – Eggs
– 1st August 2024 – Chicken
– 15th September 2024 – Yogurt
– 25th November 2024 – Sauce
– 16th November 2024 – Soup
– 19th November 2024 – Apple Juice
– 1st November 2024 – Potatoes
– 1st November 2024 – Soup
– 1st May 2024 – Carrots
– 1st January 2025 – Shortbread
– 1st January 2025 – Pasta
– 11th January 2025 – Noodles
– 1st January 2025 – Carrots
– 2nd February 2025 – Cereal
– 7th April 2025 – Green Beans
– 26th March 2025 – Rice
– 28th April 2025 – Pasta
– 1st May 2025 – Stock Cubes
I tried both written and numerical date formats. I also tried asking it to format it and then order it in separate queries so it was only doing one thing at once. I’ve tried a few separate lists and it happened with each. I also got the same results with copilot. When I pointed out the mistake it would say something like “sorry, here’s the correct list” and output the exact same thing. I then remembered something similar happened about a year ago when I asked it to list the Agatha Christie books in publication order and tell me which ones were in thr public domain. It listed them all but there were mistakes in the order. It would then tell me that only books published after (for example) 1926 or later are in the public domain, and then tell me that a book published in 1925 was.
So why can’t it do this? It seems like a very basic task, one that much less sophisticated programs could do. It has so much information, surely some of that information includes which order the months come in and that 25 comes after 16. I’ve had it do relatively complicated calculations based on a rough written description, so ordering a few dates thst are all formatted the same should be a walk in the park, right?
In: Technology
“Imagine you have a toy robot that can do lots of cool things. It can talk, play games, and even help you with your homework. But sometimes, if you ask it to do too many things at once or something very specific, it gets a little confused. That’s because the robot is programmed to understand and do things in a certain way, and sorting dates might not be something it’s really good at yet.
In the case of ChatGPT or similar AI, sorting a list of dates should indeed be straightforward. However, the AI might struggle with this task due to the way it processes and generates text. It’s designed to predict the next word in a sequence rather than perform operations like sorting. While it understands the sequence of months and numbers, applying this understanding to organize a list requires a different approach that the AI might not be optimized for.
To sort the list of dates correctly, the AI needs to:
1. Recognize each date as a data point.
2. Understand the correct chronological order of these dates.
3. Rearrange the list according to this order.
This can be challenging for language models because they’re primarily trained to generate human-like text, not to perform data manipulation tasks. However, I can certainly help you with sorting the list. Here’s the corrected order:
– 1st February 2024 – Cookies
– 1st March 2024 – Biscuits
– 1st May 2024 – Carrots
– 9th May 2024 – Chocolate
– 1st June 2024 – Soup
– 3rd June 2024 – Chocolate
– 1st August 2024 – Eggs
– 1st August 2024 – Chicken
– 15th September 2024 – Yogurt
– 1st November 2024 – Potatoes
– 1st November 2024 – Soup
– 16th November 2024 – Soup
– 19th November 2024 – Apple Juice
– 25th November 2024 – Sauce
– 1st January 2025 – Shortbread
– 1st January 2025 – Pasta
– 1st January 2025 – Carrots
– 11th January 2025 – Noodles
– 2nd February 2025 – Cereal
– 26th March 2025 – Rice
– 7th April 2025 – Green Beans
– 28th April 2025 – Pasta
– 1st May 2025 – Stock Cubes
For tasks like sorting dates, using a spreadsheet or a dedicated program might be more efficient. AI can be very helpful, but it’s always good to remember that it has limitations and might not always perform certain tasks perfectly.”
– Copilot, running on GPT-4 architecture. You’re probably using 3.5 on the ChatGPT app, though. Copilot is better.
It should (keyword is should as it doesn’t always work) manage it if you use the ISO date format (YYYY-MM-DD) but it has a fair bit of issues.
One more point on this.
People like to talk about the limits of AI based on chatbots like ChatGPT, but those aren’t the limits of AI, they’re just the limits of these particular chatbots right now.
LLM AI chat programs are, like other people have said, prediction engines which are made to sounds plausible, not necessarily correct.
But a lot of the tasks that these chatbots don’t reliably do well CAN be done reliably well by much much simpler programs. And it isn’t a huge leap to create AI not much unlike current chatbots that automatically or on command, lobs some data over to one of a library of simple programs. Sort a list. Look up the cast of a movie on IMDB etc.
I don’t know if you work in a tech or business space, but a big buzzword there is “Integrations”. It means tying together multiple programs to do complex tasks.
For instance, here’s something I built for my small business. When I make a new booking, I fill out a form with the service the client wants, their contact info, address etc. Once the form is submitted, my script takes all that information and stores it in a spreadsheet. It takes the address and uses Google Maps to calculate the distance and from that it calculates the travel fee. Then it goes to Google Docs, and uses a template to fill in a contract and invoice with all that information. Then it goes to Gmail and attaches a copy of both forms to a new email and sends that to the client with me copied.
All of that happens to be within Google because it’s pretty easy to tie google stuff together. But you can use integrations for ALL KINDS of programs. Tons of business, accounting etc online services make it really easy to plug in a million other services. And there are even services like Zapier which are just there to tie together other services.
It will not be a huge leap to tie a bunch of programs together so that a chatbot as a face does what it does well- writes kinda like it understands what you’re typing- while a bunch of other specialized programs, some AI, some probably not, do the other work, smash it all together and present it to you.
[removed]
Latest Answers