this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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In a way, NLP is just sort of an exercise in mental muscle-memory. The AI can't do the math that 1+1=2, but if you ask it what 1+1 equals, it will give you a two. Pretty much like any human would do - we don't hold up one finger and another finger and count them.
So in a way, AI embodies a sort of "fuzzy common sense" knowledge. You can ask it questions it hasn't seen before and it can give answers that haven't been given before, but conceptually it will spit out "basically the answer" to "basically that question". For a lot of things that don't require truly novel thinking, it does sort of know things.
Of course, just like we can misunderstand a question or phrase an answer badly or even just misremember an answer, the AI can be wrong. I'd say it can help out quite a bit, but I think it works best as a sort of brainstorming partner to bounce ideas off of. As a software developer, I find it a useful coding partner. It definitely doesn't have all the answers, but you can ask it something like, "why the hell doesn't his code work?" and it might give you a useful answer. It might not, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
It's best to not think of it or use it like a database, but more like a conversational partner who is fallible like any other, but can respond at your level on just about any subject. Any job that cannot benefit from discussing ideas and issues is probably not a good fit for AI assistants.