Don Knuth plays with ChatGPT
&gt; I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others,
and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic
and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.<p>Haha.<p>Maybe someone with GPT-4 access can check if it has improved. But I find it essentially regurgitating its sources.<p>I am by no way an expert in questions I ask it. But I find the answers generally speculative and not helpful.<p>I have been asking bard and chat gpt once in a while &quot;What&#x27;s the internal representation of strings in Java&quot;?<p>This is a good question to test its information retrieval capabilities. because your average blogspam site or tutorial doesn&#x27;t cover the this.<p>They both somehow fail to convey me that it&#x27;s a combination of char array and a cached hashcode.<p>At best, chat GPT told me a 3 paragraph sentence that java String was an array of UTF-16 characters, which is not quite the case since JDK 9 as I know. There&#x27;s no mention of compact strings.<p>Other day I asked what&#x27;s the GCC pass which deduplicates similar function definitions. Both chat gpt and bard made up their own pass name.<p>I am no expert in these topics, nor in ML or IR. But I don&#x27;t believe LLM is the way towards information retrieval.<p>If it&#x27;s ingesting everything it reads, it would be worse than pagerank, right?<p>Granted, it does normie stuff pretty well, like writing a data class or making HTTP request. But as soon as you need something deep, it is worse than useless, because it confidently claims incorrect stuff.