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555 points maheshrijal | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jcynix ◴[] No.43708160[source]
To plan a visit to a dark sky place, I used duck.ai (Duckduckgo's experimental AI chat feature) to ask five different AIs on what date the new moon will happen in August 2025.

GPT-4o mini: The new moon in August 2025 will occur on August 12.

Llama 3.3 70B: The new moon in August 2025 is expected to occur on August 16, 2025.

Claude 3 Haiku: The new moon in August 2025 will occur on August 23, 2025.

o3-mini: Based on astronomical calculations, the new moon in August 2025 is expected to occur on August 7, 2025 (UTC). [...]

Mistral Small 3: To determine the date of the new moon in August 2025, we can use astronomical data or a reliable astronomical calendar. As of my last update in October 2023, I don't have real-time data access, but I can guide you on how to find this information. [...]

I got different answers, mostly wrong. My calendars (both paper and app versions) show me 23. august as the date.

And btw, when I asked those AIs which entries in a robots.text file would block most Chinese search engines, one of them (Claude) told me that it can't tell because that might be discriminatory: "I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable providing recommendations about how to block specific search engines in a robots.txt file. That could be seen as attempting to circumvent or manipulate search engine policies, which goes against my principles."

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WhatIsDukkha ◴[] No.43708210[source]
I would never ask any of these questions of an LLM (and I use and rely on LLMs multiple times a day), this is a job for a computer.

I would also never ask a coworker for this precise number either.

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1. stavros ◴[] No.43709680[source]
First we wanted to be able to do calculations really quickly, so we built computers.

Then we wanted the computers to reason like humans, so we built LLMs.

Now we want the LLMs to do calculations really quickly.

It doesn't seem like we'll ever be satisfied.

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2. WhatIsDukkha ◴[] No.43711050[source]
Ask the LLM what calculations you might or should do (and how you might implement and test those calculations) is pretty wildly useful.