Recently perplexity.ai has been giving me odd answers to questions, invoking sources that talk about Ray Kurzweil and then concluding that Ray says nothing about the subject I asked. Today for example, I asked what the volume of 100 tons of gold is:
Unfortunately, none of the provided search results contain any information about the volume or density of gold that would allow me to calculate the volume of 100 tons of gold.
The search results cover the following topics:
Discusses Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about AI and technological singularity, but does not mention anything about gold’s properties.
This has been happening for about 2 weeks now. It is very strange.
To calculate the volume of 100 tons of gold, we need to know the density of gold. The density of gold is approximately 19,320 kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m³).
Given that 1 ton is equal to 1,000 kilograms, we can convert 100 tons to kilograms:
100 tons * 1,000 kg/ton = 100,000 kg
Now, we can use the formula:
Volume=Mass/Density
Volume=100,000/19,320
Volume≈5.17 m3
So, 100 tons of gold has a volume of approximately 5.17 cubic meters.
Agreed you can Google it. But I have started using perplexity.ai for a lot of stuff I used to Google. And I’ve become puzzled by some of the answers lately.
The volume of 100 tons of gold depends on its density. Gold is a dense metal, so let’s calculate the volume based on its weight.
First, we need to convert the weight from tons to troy ounces. [A metric ton (tonne) is equivalent to 32,150.7 troy ounces of gold]
Now, let’s find the volume. Assuming the gold is pure and has a density of 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm³), we can calculate the volume: [ \text{Volume (cm³)} = \frac{\text{Weight (troy ounces)}}{\text{Density (g/cm³)}} ] Plugging in the values: [ \text{Volume (cm³)} = \frac{100 \times 32,150.7}{19.32} ] The volume of 100 tons of gold is approximately 1,660,000,000 cm³.
To visualize this, imagine a cube with sides of about 15.7 inches (40 cm). [That’s roughly the size of the cube that would contain 100 tons of gold]
(I’ve deleted the footnotes)
I think this looks very authoritative, but wrong in multiple ways. I think a 15.7 in cube of gold is more like 1 ton. But who is counting?
Yes I think it is using outdated data so it is not so good for anything that happened after 2021. At least I think that was the year they gave me for the last update. Of course the paid versions are probably more up to date.
Andy
Edit: excuse me that was the free version of copilot from MS not Chat GPT itself.
Many of us have been trained in the sciences. It is no surprise when the formulas are correct.
I use Chat to give me long-tail keywords for SEO. It is very quick and good. I do not know the correlations in the search to know if the keywords are popular. They are not supposed to be popular.
The problem is creativity or innovation. Those are more uniquely human.
Finding things is AI. That is the only form of creativity I have seen from AI so far. Looking through genetic materials to find linked diseases. That is extremely good.
@bjurasz Perplexity is chewing its cud. Meaning it is reusing its database. Its system has failed.
Do you want a gold star? This has to do with the odd answers I’ve been getting from perplexity.ai. The volume of gold was just a path to get there. I could have used several other examples where perplexity kept trying to invoke Kurzweil (erroneously) in supplying an answer. This was far from the only time.
If I had to guess, someone fat fingered a manual entry of the “weight” to be given to Kurzweil … either they meant to slightly increase the weight for certain segments of knowledge and by accident made that increase global across all segments of knowledge, or they meant to increase the weight by 0.1% (0.001 weight) and accidentally messed up the decimal point and ended up with 10% (0.100 weight) or something like that.
And that in itself is not a terrible problem because it can be fixed. BUT what might be a lasting and unfixable problem is if it (perplexity) disseminated all their results with Kurzweil across the breadth of the Internet. And it did, we are discussing it right here, and likely in many other places. So now Perplexity and other AI tools are learning from the new stuff about Kurzweil that was disseminated. And that potentially can last forever.
