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You can literally ask the AI to write javascript to create a calculator or a letter counter. It will do that flawlessly. It's a tool! Don't complain your shovel won't dig a hole by itself. You have to use it correctly.

It's maths is improving, though.

I can’t wait for the bubble to burst on AI like the dotcom era did Rich people just fundamentally cannot handle being wrong about investments. Their entire personality and self-worth is tied into their wealth, so it’s always more than just losing money to them.

I'm guessing that it has commingled the rules around birthdays with, you know, regular calendar math.

In comp sci freshman year of college, we had to write a calculator in C. This would have been a failing grade. Now it’s prominently shown on the most frequented website in the world. 😏

14 bluebberries would be a good name for something to do with these slop machines, like how android used to name their OS versions after desserts.

Rounding error? “How long ago was 2010?” 9/1/25 - 12/31/10 = 5358 days = 14.7 years. Which could be rounded to 15. But a “pH.D level” of intelligence should be able to answer more precisely, or clarify the question. “What date in 2010 do you want to start calculating from?”

AI doesn't math. AI doesn't research. It simply makes up answers to your question. It gives answers, not correct answers.

So.... I guess it might not solve climate change after all?

It’s just like me fr

Bing, December 2024:

"I have made a magic computer program that is comparable to having multiple PhDs" You've fucked up a perfectly good calculator, is what you did. Look at Gemini, it's got anxiety

Yeah, this observation has been made a number of times; "You've taken a box whose purpose is to crunch numbers and made the poor thing innumerate"

classic underachieving gifted child

I realize this is nit-picky, but the linear algebra that powers LLMs is not advanced; it's very basic. Mostly just matrix multiplication. Stuff you'd learn in the first few weeks of a 1st semester linalg course.

Faster than I would have

Nobody with some knowledge of logic and basic arithmetic would arrive at the wrong answer at all, so yes. Faster and and with greater conviction.

This is why all of my google searches end with “-ai”

I know lots of people want to know how to turn the AI results off. I don't know about other browsers, but in firefox, you can add alternative search engines. Use the URL www.google.com/search?udm=1.... The udm=14 restricts the search to web results. If you want e.g. locations, use udm=1 instead.

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Scrolling on by, saw my own comment. Replying to myself like an egomaniac. I would take AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream over Gemini.

If I wanted to hear someone be confidently and obviously wrong about basic facts, I’d record my own voice.

I got a funnier one. Task failed successfully kinda deal

More seriously, the new Google restriction on 'side-loading' (running software google doesn't like) software on your phone means that engineers like myself can't give you a safe 3rd party solution without breaking hte law.

LOL I like where your going though. If he didn't need it for work, he'd beat it to death.

2025 isn't over yet so technically its been 14 years, 9 months 😉

That math ain’t mathin’

Ha ha - 10 mins ago my friend asked me what Aaron Taylor Johnson is filming right now and I got this response:

Which is all well and good until it says 2025-2010=14 ;)

DuckDuckGoAI got it right.

🤣

Gen AI is so terrible that it somehow made computers bad at math.

When you build a supercomputer that is so complex it can't even do the one thing computers excel at doing. Sure, we all laugh. But what if they're really being used to scrape and aggregate everyone's personal info, and the search engines are just a front so no one takes them seriously.

While this is a hilariously awful answer, I'm not sure you realize what a bad look actually typing this question into Google is for you.

The only way that logic works is if you take into account the current date, which I don't see mentioned in the above screenshot. Just another failure from Google to add to the list.

Hey google, do plants crave electrolytes?

It gave me this gem the other day bsky.app/profile/brot...

I'm so glad my electric bill went up. a lot

This is like one of those hilarious “math problem” bits from an Abbott and Costello movie — or one of the Ma and Pa Kettle films🤣

😂

It doesn't understand how longitude works, either:

It makes sense why capitalists focused their AI on reproducing styles stolen from artists. The tool can't do basic math, so go to a more interpretive form of expression and bastardize it...

Maybe the WWE lady was right when she called it A1.

Even when it's right it's wrong

Except we're more than halfway through the year so it ought to round UP :)

Well, kinda. It learns off of the content we provide, not necessarily the queries we ask. Every time we search and then we openly mock it for being wrong, and assuming (rightly) that it's scraping that and/or the people running it notice and correct that answer, it will learn.

Mark Carney, P.M. of Canada wants to introduce AI into the federal government. Hopefully they don't use it to calculate eligibility for CPP and OAS otherwise everybody would be delayed a year. Hmmm...maybe that's the strategy.

Imagine if they would have been honest and said LLMs are useful, but need a lot of work.

I understand the feeling. I was in college in the late seventies but I think that was only a few years ago.

🙃🙃🙃

Obviously it means that there were 14 full years IN BETWEEN 2010 and 2025. Just get used to AI being smarter than us all you guys.

Now that the NFL is starting up again I wonder who the defending Super Bowl champion is

twenny one

That’s Numberwang!

I get a different wrong answer when I ask

great news for them, they have another year to sort it out

It told me we were in 2024 instead 😂

Using LLMs to do math is beyond moronic, and Google should be ashamed of this.

I can officially confirm that AI is not as smart as a 4th-grader.

Google more like Ogle because good god they stare at data harder than a man stares at a pair of boobs

...

These multibillion-dollar LLMs are literally marketed as tech that is supposed to be able to conduct complex reasoning—Sam Altman likens them to having "PhD level experts in your pocket"—and they can't reliably answer even the simplest of questions. So yes, I'd say they're very much built on hype.

That math ain't mathing!

slight update?

"No, the year 2000 was not 25 years ago; in 2025, it was 25 years ago." This is so good!

I recently wanted to know how many middle schools were in the US. The AI tool demonstrated its inability to do addition or subtraction, and it's inability to tell the difference.

omg 🫢

Because there is no such thing as AI... LLMs are completely dependent on the information that is put into them and that makes them prone to failure.

Solution: Never. Use. Google. There are far better alternatives, like the not-free-and-totally-worth-it @kagi.com. It has AI features (also based on stolen text: they ALL are), but they're not forced down your throat.

And they're non-deterministic by necessity, that's why you can get different results from the SAME prompt...

I read this in the tone of men at work in my office that stopped by my desk for no apparent reason uncalled for

A couple of months ago I googled what date it would be in 60 weeks (I was following a weekly book collection and wanted to know when it'll end). Google AI said it was the following month. It also took the time to explain how there were 420 days between June 24 and July 24. Brilliant.

Whut??

Everybody forgets you have to bolt a deterministic calculator to an LLM to get it past 8-year-old smart.

"Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying 'Blood...blood...blood...blood...'" - Douglas Adams

Money will not buy you numeracy. - Google, probabilistically

The wild thing is you COULD argue it was 14 years ago, b/c this year isn't over so maybe you don't count it, but then it goes and says "2025-2010=14" 🙃

Nice.

ngl the fact its always wrong with counting by 1, indicates its close and probably just approximation issues( since matrix calculations with cheap floats). Feels kinda like dyslexia I guess where we tend to do minor math mistakes even if our logic is correct lol. But obviously silly for an AI.

🤦

Just for interest's sake, similar but different:

kinda cringe to be logged into google bro cut the cord

This actually makes me feel good because I can’t do math in my head either

Good old Abominable Intelligence!

I’ve had to correct ChatGPT….

Truly a PhD in mathematics (just not very good at arithmetic)

"9/11 never happened. But while it didn't happen, we cannot hide the fact that aliens set bombs to the Wall Trade Center during the Mayan invasion of France, in 92 BC"

Google searches went down for the first time ever in May 2025. Some of that traffic went to chatGPT, but more people are using other search engines because they’ve been made aware of them.

Same wrong, but different lol

My grade two math teacher is going to get a tersely worded post on her obit site as AI has vindicated me!

Try asking if August 31 2010 was 15 years ago - it should say yes. Computers are pendantic. And annoying AF.

It needs to be scrapped, but they refuse to admit it

Hanging on to this gem that was posted a couple days ago

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