Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
97 comments
ROTOPE~1 :yell:

@nixCraft you don't believe it? Prove that the AI is wrong, I dare you.

Andreas K

@rotopenguin @nixCraft
🤷 The question is so common, there is a whole Wiki article.

Or perhaps it's also historically interesting.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_th

phecda

@nixCraft A little rounding never hurt anyone, we can just safely ignore all digits past 3.14159265359, if we just round the last digit up, right.

Andreas K

@phecda @nixCraft Well, you do have to excuse old Chat here, as an LLM, he rounds everything to the precision of his neurons. Just kidding.

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@nixCraft
That's wrong twice; first on pi's irrationality, and second that the digits ChatGPT is quoting rounds up the last digit.

The first few digits are 3.141592653589793 -- so GPT should have said 65358....

gnaddrig

@dougmerritt @nixCraft But how was the poor thing to know that the last digit a calculator shows is not the last digit of pi. Don't be so harsh, the little bugger has only just begun learning about the big world...

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@gnaddrig @nixCraft
Yeah, you're right. I should scratch it under the chin and give it a treat and encourage it to go on to better things.

Then it will sit up and beg for another encyclopedia or something.

László Kupcsik

@dougmerritt
Are you absolutely sure that 65359 does not occur somewhere down the line? :)
@nixCraft

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@kupac
I have a marvelous proof that it never occurs -- but unfortunatly it won't fit in this margin, errr i mean, this post.

Potung Thul

@dougmerritt
@kupac

I'm boosting, not because of what you wrote, but because of that hilarious handle:
log 😅 = 💧 log 😄

That is brilliant!

I'm going to go boost all the posts where that appears.
In other words, all your posts.
:)
(Not really. But thanks for making my day!)

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@potungthul @kupac
Thanks so much! I'm really glad you enjoyed that light bit of entertainment. 😀

"You're a gentleman and a scholar", as they apparently used to say.

I looked it up to make sure it didn't surprise me by having some negative twist: writingtips.org/a-gentleman-an

Edit: I see in your profile now "(Shamelessly stolen from
@dougmerritt )" -- any time you feel like it, you can add "with permission", although you don't have to if you don't want to.

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@alexraffa @kupac @nixCraft
No, it is not certain, it's never been proven.

Most research mathematicians think it's likely, but that's not the same as certain, by any means.

alexraffa :unverified:

@dougmerritt @kupac @nixCraft yes, it has not been proven, it's fun to think every numer is contained in pi somewhere .. 👍

Allen Morris

@alexraffa @kupac @dougmerritt @nixCraft I would assume that every (finite) sequence of numbers appears in PI an infinite number of times: the proof is left as an exercise.

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@gam3 @alexraffa @kupac @nixCraft
Well, your wild guess is unhelpful, since it's a famous unsolved problem in mathematics.

As I already said.

The field of study where personal opinion is superior to provable facts is modern politics, not mathematics.

Evannakita

@dougmerritt @nixCraft Or if you give it a little more credit, perhaps it knows pi to 245962 decimal places!

Potung Thul

@BoscoZebra
@nixCraft

2 panel comic.
First panel:
"That's the Meta AI. You can ask it anything."
Second panel:
"Ask it to fuck off."

JC 💾🚀🪐

@nixCraft the end of Contact by Carl Sagan be like

🪨

@nixCraft My calculator said the same thing, so it must be right!

Gabriel Pettier

@nixCraft prove it's wrong if you are that smart! 😆

OldGuySelfHosting

@nixCraft It's now 53592. I spent hours at the calculator and even double-checked it.

Travis

@nixCraft everyone knows the last 7 digits are 8675309

Bill Ricker

@mordoc @tebrown @nixCraft
Yes.
But that table omits the critical entry for 1592CE which got this answer.

Bill Ricker

@mordoc @tebrown @nixCraft
And Machin series will still find this value at eighth term!

round digits error rounded with-next-dig
00: (01) -4.17e-02 3.2 3.18
01: (03) 9.96e-04 3.141 3.1405
02: (04) -2.84e-05 3.1416 3.14162
03: (06) 8.81e-07 3.141592 3.1415917
04: (07) -2.88e-08 3.1415927 3.14159268
05: (09) 9.74e-10 3.141592653 3.1415926526
06: (10) -3.38e-11 3.1415926536 3.14159265362
07: (11) 1.19e-12 3.14159265359 3.141592653588

Mordoc 🇨🇦

@n1vux @tebrown @nixCraft Totally agree, it just makes sense of where it got the information. It's the old, "AI your slip is showing..."

Bill Ricker

@mordoc @tebrown @nixCraft yeah, getting the answer from Reddit not Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathematica or OEIS demonstrates that there is no Understanding in merely syntactic LLM PISS Artificial Ignorance.

Nazo

@nixCraft I think it was trying to say 65535 but messed even that up.

Microfractal

@nixCraft 🤣 What does the AI say about other constants such as e (2.718...) or the square root / natural logarithm of 2?

Evannakita

@nixCraft petition to change ChatGPT’s value of pi to have 38 decimal places so it claims the last three digits of pi are 420

amós :Ryyca:

@nixCraft Ah, one of my main issue in AI: it isn't able to say NO.

FediThing 🏳️‍🌈

@nixCraft

Hopefully this gets through to at least the maths crowd about how utterly crap and lacking in awareness of basic facts AI/LLM is.

This isn't a fake screenshot, it really does give this as the answer.

moirearty

@FediThing @nixCraft version? There are a lot of people using old / garbage versions of these LLMs for laughs.

Claude:

“The last 5 digits of pi are not known, as pi is an irrational number with an infinite number of non-repeating digits after the decimal point. Pi has been calculated to over 100 trillion digits, but there is no "end" to the sequence of digits. The idea of there being "last" digits of pi is a misconception.”

I’m not a strong AI proponent but the commentary is wrongheaded.

raganwald 🍓

@moirearty @FediThing @nixCraft

First, it’s just fun. This isn’t an academic paper. And ChatGPT is a product, it’s ok to dunk on products that were launched to the public in shitty form.

This particular thing has been “fixed”in ChatGPT 4. The open question is, “What hasn’t been fixed, because it’s not popular enough for people to have discovered the error yet?”

FediThing 🏳️‍🌈

@raganwald @moirearty @nixCraft

I tested it on an actual deployed version of ChatGPT currently available to the public on a major mainstream website (I'm not giving it free publicity by linking though). It still gives this result.

And yes, the main point isn't whether this particular thing has been fixed, but the fact that the makers had to make this correction, presumably manually.

AI/LLM is being irresponsibly mis-sold as a replacement for expertise, when all it does is bullshit about stuff it has heard about but has no actual knowledge of. It's going to corrupt and degrade society if we start relying on it for information.

@raganwald @moirearty @nixCraft

I tested it on an actual deployed version of ChatGPT currently available to the public on a major mainstream website (I'm not giving it free publicity by linking though). It still gives this result.

And yes, the main point isn't whether this particular thing has been fixed, but the fact that the makers had to make this correction, presumably manually.

FediThing 🏳️‍🌈

@raganwald @moirearty @nixCraft

So no, the commentary is not at all wrongheaded. The commentary is totally apt.

ChatGPT literally does not know what it is talking about, and we need to stop treating it like it has any value beyond entertainment or niche studies of linguistics.

moirearty

@FediThing @raganwald @nixCraft I agree from one point of view on this, Generative AI should not be getting the insane funding and roll-out / shoved down everyone’s throat it is exactly because of what you’re saying.

I’m not a proponent of this technology overall and think it’s a useful tool in limited circumstances alone, and that any march toward “AGI” using similar technology is absolutely a lie and they’re more or less hopping they figure something out.

moirearty

@FediThing @raganwald @nixCraft However, people also think a manual correction was made which I’m reasonably sure is not true.

The tech, as oversold as it is, did get better. There are limited but useful reasoning capabilities, it is not just a “stochastic parrot” as the early versions absolutely were etc.

IMO some technologists won’t keep up with this field because they wrote it off (for good reason) and am not arguing in favor of a business case, but we will be dealing with it for years.

moirearty

@FediThing @raganwald @nixCraft from a product standpoint I am in full agreement and think these companies should be rightly criticized.

From a Computer Science point of view, I believe some of the smartest folks are falling into the trap of “the thing I looked at previously was horrible so I’ve written it of entirely” and will be dogmatic about it to the detriment of their own field.

There is an area between “AGI” (which is bs until breakthroughs tbd) and where we are now that will be useful.

raganwald 🍓

@moirearty @FediThing @nixCraft

Tons of useful applications for ANI today, just as Newton and Macintosh 128K had use cases.

raganwald 🍓

@moirearty @FediThing @nixCraft

What we know is that there is a way to report errors, and they do use the error reports to guide workers who train the model.

There is also the possibility that the model itself has improved in a way that corrects this error without needing humans to focus training on it.

Either way, this seems like a product from a company that is asking the world to beta-test it in production, and simultaneously, it’s a product where we cannot have a “complete test suite.”

ZANitebug

@nixCraft somewhere out there is an individual named pi wondering why the last 5 digits of their phone number keeps getting given out by an ai

Sassinake! - ⊃∪∩⪽

@nixCraft

it's a stupefying machine

This is going to hamstring a whole generation.

Alan Miller :verified_paw:

@nixCraft who would have thought that Steven Colbert would be the one to sum up the core of future technology so well?

BeAware :veriweed:

@nixCraft@mastodon.social what version of ChatGPT are you using? Cause it's not what I get...🤔

I know dunking on AI is the new "boost plz" but let's try to be accurate about what it actually says, currently...

Xerø

@nixCraft take note of that number, the machines must think it will be important.

Three plus or minus five

@nixCraft
GladOS:This statesmen is a lie.
Wheatley: I’m gonna say…. false.

Scott Matter

@nixCraft

If we all ask it to calculate Pi, could we knock it offline?

Assuming no because it will just generate some plausible looking series of numbers rather than actually calculating 22/7

Bill Ricker

@nixCraft
That version of ChatGPT was correct for 1592CE.

pixx

@nixCraft if you treat pi as 3.14159265359, it's not wrong :p

Kenneth Freeman

@nixCraft TBF that’s when it stopped counting.

vu2tum

@nixCraft
I have a different answer, obviously

Mike

@nixCraft Thanks to AI we finally know! Why do I see crying math teachers in an abandoned classroom …

Jérôme Petazzoni

@nixCraft that's just wrong, everyone worth their salt knows that the last 5 digits of pi are 42

nyx

@nixCraft But ... *whispers* what if it's right and we're wrong

😛

aaron

@nixCraft Their new model is smarter though!

Adam R. Wood

@nixCraft "And if our transcendental lift should find a final floor / Then man will know the death of God where wonder was before"
- from "Pi" by Hard 'n Phirm

Rūdolfs Ciemiņš

@nixCraft, ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.

thefathippy

@nixCraft @dgar

At last, AI has solved it. Take that, brainiacs!

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

😉

Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)

@nixCraft It's truncating: 3.14159265359 is where it got that from.

Alexander Knochel

@nixCraft New Chatty is boring me with explanations why the question is bad.

Arthur

@nixCraft it's impossible to prove it wrong

Jerry Lerman

@nixCraft At least Gemini Advanced got it right as shown. And it offered more about it when I asked if this is true for any number base. I'm not saying Gemini is better or great, I just personally like to test things out.

As per Gemini Advanced:

Yes, this is true for every possible base number system. Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction of two integers. This property holds true regardless of the base used to represent the number.

Decimal (Base-10): The most common way we represent numbers, pi is approximately 3.14159... The decimals go on infinitely without repeating.
Binary (Base-2): In computers, pi would be represented as 11.0010010000111111... Again, the digits go on infinitely without repeating.
Hexadecimal (Base-16): Here, pi is 3.243F6A8885A308D3... Infinite and non-repeating.

This pattern continues for any other base. The representation of pi will always be infinite and non-repeating. This is a fundamental property of irrational numbers and not dependent on the chosen base.

@nixCraft At least Gemini Advanced got it right as shown. And it offered more about it when I asked if this is true for any number base. I'm not saying Gemini is better or great, I just personally like to test things out.

As per Gemini Advanced:

Yes, this is true for every possible base number system. Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction of two integers. This property holds true regardless of the base used to represent the number.

Andreas K

@nixCraft I'm so happy that some places talk already about LLM usage in teaching maths.

And their biggest worry is that students might cheat with the help of AI.

JJDSEC

@nixCraft
I'd be curious how far along these digits show up. Maybe it would indicate how much memory chatGPT has, or how long before it decided to give up or timeout.

Michal z Michle

@nixCraft I know it is a joke but... Come on! GPT4-turbo would never do that mistake. GPT-4o (the new model that now even unpaid customers can use) neither. To get that answer you must chose GPT3.5 that is now #29 on lmsys bechmark.

Go with llama 3 70b. You can even install it on your laptop if you have a good one.

Chip35

@nixCraft OK, that just means that it's calculator only does 12 digits.
3.14159265359.

Go Up