Why AI is failing at giving good advice

TLDR: ChatGPT generates responses based on the highest mathematical probabilities derived from existing texts on the internet. Popular advice (for various reasons) is seldomly good, nor (by definition) uniquely applicable, nor (mostly) founded on actual experience. You are probably better off taking advice from a real person who can empathize and knows what they are talking about.

ChatGPT, which has previously consumed half or more of the internet to build its language model, will translate your question into a mathematical representation of numbers (e.g., a vector).

I don't know in detail how they do it, and I am sure there are some layers in between and around that serve some specific purpose, but I understand that if you google the phrase "How are you?", you can statistically expect a certain range of words and sentences in the results around it. Most sentences following the question will probably sound like "I'm good, thanks" or "Doing great, how about you?". Whereas if you search the internet for all occurrences of "Integrated circuit", you will usually find a very distinct set of words and sentences nearby, like "silicon semiconductor," "MOS transistor," or "the voltage requirement is 0.6V".

With so much base data, you can assign a mathematical value (or direction) to every word, change it when it appears together with other words (context), and compute an entire, unique direction for a continuous piece of text.

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