About whether ChatGPT really knows things or just makes them up.
Has this happened?
Yes 56 (41%)Not sure 33 (24%)No 47 (35%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether ChatGPT really knows things or just makes them up.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I think ultimately any truly intelligent entity needs to have agency - to be able to interact with the world and test truth (prediction correctness) for itself.
Without this you're really just an expert system - a bunch of canned data/rules.
The strength of ChatGPT over a GOFAI expert system like Cyc is how broad it's knowledge base is, but the weaknesses are that is doesn't know whether this "knowledge" (being self-deduced from the training set) is true or not, nor does it have any reliable way to combine facts/sources, since those rules are also self-derived and unverified. I'm sure some of this could be mitigated by more human curation (which seems to be the path OpenAI is going down), but then it seems it is just an expert system (maybe this is all people are looking for anyway).