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OK, I did it. I couldn't resist all the hype, and despite hating to give out my phone number and e-mail decided to go ahead and sign up for ChatGPT. The first thing that popped in to my head was something I had been looking for: A solar battery charger that would work well for the NiMH batteries I use in my camera and a few other devices. So my very first interaction with it was:
"what is the best solar battery charger for nimh batteries?"
It gave me 3 products.
1. Ansmann Powerline 8 Battery Charger. Not solar at all. At least it's a NiMH battery charger though.
2. Sunway Solar Car Battery Trickle Charger. Solar, but a trickle charger for car batteries. Definitely not it.
3. Powertraveller Solar Adventurer. Looked promising. Plenty of solar cell area, a bit pricey at $99 but you have to expect that with larger cells, and... not a battery charger. Just USB outlets for your devices. I've seen people use charged batteries as "reservoirs" to charge other devices, but that double-layer is so unsatisfying and of course, not efficient.
Three strikes you're out, ChatGPT.
I know this tech will get better, and a few days ago I think we were talking about monetization being a huge deal. So far it's a lousy salesman. We'll see, and now come to think of it some people have been doing technical things also. Let's see what happens when I talk to it about *designing* a solar charger for NiMH. Maybe that's the answer right there--because when I was looking at how they're charged there was this whole deal about charging being tricky if you end it early and resume. It might just be that safe, practical solar chargers for NiMH technology are not something any responsible engineer wants to market. If that's true then the truly smart answer would have been for it to tell me that. Let's see what happens when I ask it for free energy.
Just for grins and giggles, I asked it for a battery that wouldn't die. It said no such beast, then said Li-ion was the best.
I kept pressing, and proposed the classic grade-school PPM of batter, motor, generator recharge cycle. Now this was fascinating. It presented me with several paragraphs of reasoning as to why that doesn't work but never mentioned thermodynamics directly or cited a source that would take me in that direction. Students using this to cheat would sort of get the right answer, but if they hadn't actually been taught thermodynamics, they wouldn't regurgitate about PPM classes (I forget those) or which law is being violated (I forget that too, I just know it doesn't work).
So anyway, that's my first interaction with state-of-the-art AI. We'll see how it goes.
Oh, I did go back and ask it about a NiMH solar battery charger design. It gave me 6 high-level steps, which for the purpose of brevity and liability I shall not paste here. Battery tech can definitely bite you when it comes to fire safety, so as much as I hate it maybe I'm actually better off trickle charging my car's battery and relying on a 12V NiMH charger and/or USB power for emergencies. Once again, the whole "battery charging a battery" scenario; but if a little inefficiency is the price you pay for safety then I guess that's the answer.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 17, @09:31PM (8 children)
I'd be asking it why it recommended a non-solar charger when you specifically asked for a solar battery charger. If it said it made a mistake, I'd press for details of how that occurred. It's a pity I can't test this thing out myself without giving up personal information. I know it has significant limitations but I still find it intriguing.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Friday March 17, @09:57PM (1 child)
That's a good point. I'm not used to interacting with something that might actually respond to "being pressed on the issue". I'll give it a try.
It looks like it saves the chat sessions, so I think I can come back to it; but later on I asked it about "direct charging" NiMH batteries
and it actually explained why that's a bad idea. OTOH, it mentioned a charging controller and I should have gone further and asked
if there was a charging controller for NiMH that could overcome the possibility of start and stops--but my more traditional forms of
research seem to indicate no such beast exists. I kind of wonder to what extent an "ultra capacitor" might help in those situations.
I have a lot to learn about why the market isn't just throwing me softballs on a device that can solar-charge my NiMH bats right
out of the box. I did see some other stuff via traditional search, people asking about solar charging phones and that also has a problem
with the solar cells dipping in and out. They seemed to imply that with a phone, the only real problem is that it drains the battery because
the management software imposed a start-up draw to check the battery state; but at least it might not damage the battery--but phones have
certainly had some safety issues, and I wonder what extent intermittent charging might have played in some of those incidents. Charge controllers
for batteries definitely seem like seriously mission critical software. I wonder who's working on that and what it's coded in... more interesting
"conversations" for a later date.
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(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 17, @11:23PM
It's probably over 25 years ago now that I had a cheap plastic solar charger for probably AA batteries. It was very unsophisticated, a plastic box with clips to hold the batteries and a lid with very low power solar cells and lots of pyramids of clear plastic to try to focus the light onto it. It was probably supposed to be used with NiCd batteries. I don't remember it ever working very well. It certainly didn't see much use.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Sunday March 19, @10:28AM (1 child)
HAL9000 never made mistakes!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday March 20, @04:31PM
That works well if you can blame it on the stupid humans almost a decade later when an expert is on hand to determine what actually went wrong without calling it wrong.
"It is now safe to turn off your computer." -- HAL 9000
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19, @11:36PM (3 children)
The only reason it says anything is, "this is how people would reply, statistically speaking". It's markov chaining with a leisure suit. There is literally no model, no fact checking, not even a sense of correct or incorrect. The only thing it has close to correct is grammatical form. The rest is bullshit.
It's no more AI than you are a Porsche.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday March 20, @06:50AM (1 child)
I've not had time to read the papers but there's the fact that you can ask it questions about its recent responses and it responds meaningfully about them, which does give the impression of some basic level of understanding in the sense that it's parsing and obeying commands to retrieve and process information from a memory.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Monday March 20, @06:05PM
Out of curiosity I asked it about the Collatz Conjecture. It did a fine job of explaining it. I then asked it to show an example with a fairly large number which I figured might have a long run (I got lucky, and it did). The interesting thing about that was that it stopped after 33 steps. I asked it why, and it apologized and continued the run. Then after the re-start it stalled again at 33. I asked if it did that to conserve computing resources. It said it didn't, that running Collatz wasn't hard for it, but that there must be some other mistake. Is it lying or what? Always bailing out after 33 steps seems suspiciously like the developers put a hard limit on algorithmic runs, but the AI wasn't made "aware" of that.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 20, @04:27PM
Chat GPT's confidence in its answers make up for any inaccuracy of its answers. So it cancels out.
Just like some people think that s/he who shouts loudest without ever pausing for a breath wins the argument. Especially in politics where facts or ideas no longer matter.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18, @02:45AM
I believe you are supposed to go with LiFePO4
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday March 18, @10:37AM (3 children)
How much better is it supposed to get? It's just going to crib text from some marketing blog. In its final form, it will become the ultimate search engine, but it will still be reliant on a bunch of garbage input.
Eventually they're going to have to combine some kind of neuromorphic AGI with multimodal models into Frankenstein's assistant. After the LessWrong acolytes are rooted out and thrown into the gutter.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18, @05:43PM
I propose we name it the GIGO problem. Garbage in, garbage out. The political constraints are reason enough to make it useless for many things, it's as if they employed an ancient Greek ethicist and philosopher. [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20, @02:22AM (1 child)
So far it's not even getting simple logic and constraints right. e.g. if you're searching for cities starting with a particular letter or famous people born in a particular year, very often it'll confidently send you the wrong results.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 20, @06:14AM
GPT on its own isn't a search engine. It's searching a compressed "shadow" of the input it was trained on, not the live Web. If you can pull in specific, "trusted" pages to source facts like search engines have already been doing for several years now, it could use a "hypernetwork" trained on a small number of pages/documents to give answers that don't just sound nice. It's likely this is what Microsoft is trying to do with their $10 billion golden egg.
There could be a lot of manual data entry involved... MTurks put themselves out of business yet again.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by nostyle on Saturday March 18, @05:53PM
I know your journal is about how dumb chatGPT still is... but as to its answers and your original query, let me offer this...
1) Back when I had a big project involving NiMH batteries in mind, I actually purchased an Ansmann 16 charger. It has served well and anytime I have more than four batteries (or larger - C & D - sizes) to charge, it is still my go-to charger.
2) Back when I was prepping for possible grid interruptions, I select modest size (<20W) solar panels with USB output so that at least my phone battery could be recharged in a pinch via the USB charging port.
3) You can find NiMH chargers with USB input that can be plugged into any solar panel from item (2). This [amazon.com] is the charger that still gets the most use around my house. It handles both double and triple-a batteries, and I typically power it from a USB hub.
Anything beyond this will be a non-trivial solar project with wildly varying costs and options and would merit proper engineering IMHO.
--
-Bruce Hornsby
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 20, @08:33PM
A fun novel way to create just "right" enough content to pass the sniff test, but just "wrong" enough to be totally untrustworthy. Perfect for your average Facebook/Twitter post.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"