Ok, it is pretty good when you ask it a question about simple electrical.
I put in "What is the voltage drop in 50 feet of 12 awg copper wire carrying 20 amps?"
It said:
"blah blah formula blah blah"
"Therefore, the voltage drop in a 50-foot length of 12 AWG copper wire carrying 20 amps is approximately 1.594 volts."
...
That's impressive that it breaks down the language and gets right to an answer.
But I was curious how this compares to good old Google search. So I entered that exact phrase, and I generally got useful links to tables, calculators etc. So not a spoon-fed answer, but sure gets you close.
But more interesting, was the links to discussions on forums or things like reddit, quora, etc.
OK, Smarty-ChatGPT - who said it was 50/60 Hz AC, or DC, or 2.5 GHz? Some humans had tore the question apart when asked in one of those forums. State all the conditions (frequency, capacitance, etc), don't make assumptions.
Heck, it would be easy to assume that for the above question that the intent was to get the voltage drop in a house circuit, which would be double for the round-trip. I know that wasn't the question, but maybe the round trip number should have been mentioned?
So again, if the person asking doesn't really know how to figure this out, they may not know what to ask to get the right answer.
Hey, this is a little like an oft-repeated phrase here - once you know enough to evaluate a for-hire Financial Advisor, you know enough to do it yourself (for the investment aspect at least).
Again, I'm not knocking on ChatGPT, I'm super-impressed, and it will be super useful for many things. Like any tool, the limitations and application suitability must be understood by the user, or Garbage in - Garbage out.
An old-time poster on a technical forum I follow often said something like "A question well asked, will often provide the answer." IOW, if you put enough thought into everything behind the question, and how to state it clearly and take all the factors into consideration, you just might come to the answer on your own. Or at least, really help someone give you a clear, correct answer.
I think I also mentioned earlier, when people talked about AI being able to write code - I said that you need to give it precise definition of what you want the code to do. Often, that's the hard part, and the coding becomes fairly straightforward. So people will still need to define the conditions in detail, or GIGO.
-ERD50