alt Hacker NewsActually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly options, what do they cost, can my truck actually tow the combined weight, etc.
I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just tried "I want to tow a car of make A with my truck model B, from point C to point D, what are my options?" And it wrote me a report with comparison tables and computed towing weights and other details for different options.
At that point, I was like "Oh. This is different. And it's just the beginning."
Replies
Good thing you didn't want to wash the car on your way.
It very plausibly might have been totally wrong.
Out of laziness I several times asked Claude and ChatGPT each some torque figures and other simple, hard data related to my dirt bike. They often got it completely wrong, but full of confidence every time. I never trust LLMs with hard data, unless you RAG the PDF into the context and even then it's sketchy.
Fascinating; you used a non-deterministic tool - one that disclaims its own accuracy - to calculate critical information that could result in serious damages or physical injury? Did you like, double-check the results?
One must imagine how many claims have been denied by insurance companies for doing something like this...
Similarly, I used gen ai to review a real estate purchase. I provided Zillow listing photos and serial numbers of all appliances, the electric panel, and a few additional not pictured areas that I took during the walk through.
I prompted the AI to write a report as if it were a home inspector and it actually did a better job and identified some issues the paid 750 usd inspector missed.