Degringolade

Artsy fartsy

So I finally caved and went to check out the foofooraw concerning this whole AI thing that has folks all riled up.  I went in with some preconceptions.  The first preconception is the idea of “machine intelligence” is probably significantly less than the advertising agencies masquerading as “Tech Titans” want you to believe.

So mostly I went in and asked specific questions:  Subjects like carrying capacity and oil use and fertilizer use.  The results really don’t seem to be all that different than using a decent search engine.  

First I need to discuss the “platform” that I used.  I used Grok, not because I did any serious research, but because its owner pisses off people who amuse me immensely with their histrionics.  I seriously doubt that other competitors in this will give any “better” answers to my basic queries.

Second, I am not going to publish the results here, if this kind of thing interests you, go and play around with it yourself.  All I am going to discuss is what I think of the results.  

Simply put, when I search a subject using the google search engine with add "udm=14" which strips off the AI from google search, I get a string of links which let me look at other folks websites which will purportedly answer my question.  This is what I am used to.  It has worked pretty well for the past twenty years.  I really have no complaints.  

I posed the same question to grok, and I got back a 2300 word essay with footnotes (links) summarizing what is out there.  The links are pretty damn close to what the udm=14 gave me and actually was more pleasant to work with.  For the question “Calculate Earth's carrying capacity for humans”, it actually offered several fairly exhaustive studies with a not-at-all terrible condensation of the data available.

Overall, what grok gave me was approximately equivalent to what I would expect from an average freshman at a small state college.