ChatGPT: something to play with over Christmas

So, did anyone see DeepSeek coming?

This new GenAI model was created very quickly, very cheaply, by a hedge fund in China!
It runs on less power than ChatGPT, on lower cost hardware, and it has been released as open source software.

China has more talented graduates than the USA & [I'm guessing] are cheaper to employ. So Silicon Valley may be in for a kicking.

From what I've heard, DeepSeek is better than ChatGPT for technical questions like: 'teach me algebra' but doesn't seem to know anything about Tiananmen Square!

Its already proved to be a very popular app download, and I can see this open source code being used by many in the west as the basis for new projects & applications.

 

Not a fan of AI but this is pretty interesting:

 

I object to the more detailed registration information required now, compared to how it was 2 years ago.

So I'm now trying out this anonymous service:-

AnonChatGPT

 

Its now just over 2 years since I started this thread. Much of the stuff in the news said to be "AI" is not really AI, but a lot of progress has been made & I think there are many positives.
Just using ChatGPT to give answers to questions is far more enjoyable than typing the same thing into a search engine, because the latter now exists to serve commercial interests.
I often joke that if you type "I found a rat in my garden" into a search engine, the top response will probably be "get your garden rats from Amazon". Whereas (at the moment) ChatGPT just addresses your question.

 

I've found my new imaginary friend (ChatGPT) very useful when it comes to identifying images.

Having recently returned from Costa Rica with hundreds of bird photos, I managed to identify most using 2 books; a field guide & a photo guide; the photo guide only includes 365 species, while the field guide contains over 900 species, but most illustrations are hand drawn, which can make identifying some birds (especially those with iridescent feathers, where colours vary with lighting conditions) difficult, like this hummingbird;



But ChatGPT was able to confirm that this was a Crowned Woodnymph.

Its also pretty good with poor, noisy photos like this one, which ChatGPT identified as a White-lored Gnatcatcher.

(ChatGPT also started asking me questions about where I'd been, what other birds I'd seen!)​

I've also submitted night sky photos like this one, where I'm not sure if it contains a meteor or a [Iridium] satellite.



It also read the date on this photo and suggested it was a meteor from the Perseids meteor shower last summer.


I'll try ChatGPT on a few WW2 photos when time permits.

The version used is this free version with Engine 4:-
https://chatgpt.com/

 

I have used it briefly and asked it about AGRAs and like another member suggested, it seems to heavily base it's answers off Wiki articles, although AGRAs seem to be a very obscure thing even in books and such.

 

I have just asked it about the 54th Heavy Regiment during WW2 and it is safe to say that the answer it provided was very wrong and full of inconsistencies.

 

When ChatGPT first 'arrived' many people thought it was just a bit of software that scanned the internet to find answers to your questions.
Of course this is not correct, and all AI based systems rely upon training data ...lots of it.


Then there is the question of accuracy.
Like any new technology, it will initially be bug-ridden. It may take another <insert your number here> years before its 99.99% reliable & accurate.

What is knowledge anyway?
When I was at primary school in the late 1950s, a teacher told our class that the reason a compass pointed north was due to an unusually large amount of iron ore in the arctic wastes of Canada. In fairness, he was very old and probably attended school in the late Victorian era, when that theory was still in circulation. The point is, 'facts' can change over time, even books contain outdated information.

Wikipedia is currently probably our most accurate source of general information. Articles are continually under scrutiny and subject to ongoing editing.
So its probably no surprise that some answers look like Wikipedia responses. Its probably because they represent the widely accepted view.

Our (human) knowledge base builds upon a cumulative series of observations, experimentation, calculation & so on. But the answers to some questions will always be based on either the latest thinking, an 'old-school' explanation, or some form or widespread misinformation (e.g. ideas that have been promoted widely, maybe for political or financial gain).

And the answers to some questions are subjective. Therefore if you ask ChatGPT what was the best WW2 era tank, you may not be happy with the answer.

Generally speaking; 'rubbish in' = 'rubbish out'

 

DuckDuckGo currently have a menu option to select Duck.ai

Its currently free of advertising/marketing promotions, ...but we may look back on this time as the Golden Age, as I can't see how their financial model works, so don't expect this to last very long.

Duck.ai gives you a choice of generative AI 'engines'; GPT-4o mini, Llama 3.3 70B, Claude 3 Haiku, o3-mini, Mistral Small 3

I don't use search engines very much any more, unless I want to buy something!

 

VEO 3

The time is nearly nigh