Something AI should be able to do but for some reason can't
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Mayla and I spent New Years Eve in the city. Of course I procrastinated and was looking for a reservation 12/30.
I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok the following question:
Which Marriott Hotels in NYC have a suite available for 12/31 for one night?
ChatGPT said it couldn't do that but here's a list of Marriotts in NYC.
Claude just said it couldn't do that because it's not connected to their internal systems. (me: yes you are, idiot, via the web browser)
Grok just hung.
This is rote, simple but very time consuming work that they should be able to do. Granted maybe the hotels don't want them to, but still.
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Seems the AI would need access to private information from the businesses. I could imagine an AI that went through expedia and booking.com, granted. But I wonder if that would land the AI purveyor into some hot water.
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Why couldn't they do exactly what I did? Again, I get that the hotels might not want them to, but do they have legal grounds? Especially if I'm not asking for price?
I just knew most would be sold out and I might check 10-15 before I found one that wasn't.
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ChatGPT will not even look at a website you specify. For instance, you cannot say "summarize www.whatever.com".
I assume it has to do with security/safety issues.
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When you shake someone's deep sense of self-worth, leaving a scar in their ego, they will persistently try to diminish you through petty arguments & obsessive captious criticism of your actions, just to soothe the wound.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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By some accounts, Siri was initially built to do things for you instead of just answering questions, but Apple Inc. steered Siri into a different direction than when the inventors/founders envisioned.
ChatGPT and Grok are mere language models rather than "do engine" -- they are not designed to do things for you, not beyond generating text based on pretraining data.
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@jon-nyc said in Something AI should be able to do but for some reason can't:
Yeah I bet that’s wrong. Ain’t no suite going for $250.
That’s the tedious part. Google can tell you which hotels have availability.
AI takes in data and predicts what you most likely are expecting in terms of a response. Couple that with how form page copy is written—it leaves out a lot of exposition in lieu of its design context—and I'm not at all surprised it can't do this yet. It's not the kind of question it excels in answering.
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When you shake someone's deep sense of self-worth, leaving a scar in their ego, they will persistently try to diminish you through petty arguments & obsessive captious criticism of your actions, just to soothe the wound.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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@jon-nyc said in Something AI should be able to do but for some reason can't:
Right but the newer version do search the web in real time.
@jon-nyc said in Something AI should be able to do but for some reason can't:
Right but the newer version do search the web in real time.
Yes but I'd refer you to my comment about form page copy and how that is interpreted as text versus something that is straight exposition. It's much harder for models to make predictions based on form copy because it's so unlike its training data and leaves a lot of context out.
For example, those pages don't say "We have 3 suites available for 12/31 for one night." Just look at the copy on those pages and only the copy. It's a lot harder to generate predictive text based on something so sparse.
It'll get there most likely, just not there yet.
