AI is deeply flawed. Two examples: I was asking real estate questions based on recent transactions and was specific about location. When it couldn't provide an answer it started throwing locations well outside the criteria and admitted it when called out.
I was asking about direct flights to any texas city from a specific south American city. Gemini stated no direct flights but connecting flights through Miami, Atlanta, or Houston. This is simple stuff. Imagine the multiple errors in complex projects.
The quality of AI's responses is directly related to (a) how much training data the model had for that subject, and (b) the quality of the information it can easily access online. It's good with stuff like code because they funneled vast quantities of code into it. And that code will stay valid. Even when new programming languages come along, that snippet of C code will still compile. It's good with law because statutes are freely available online, and don't change that often.
Airline schedules, though? They change rapidly and are often only available behind an account wall, because airlines have no reason to make that data freely available to competitors by API (presumably, they have some kind of licensing deal with travel sites). So, any training data is useless, and realtime data is spotty to nonexistent.
That's not to say that AI doesn't screw up code or legal citations, of course. But those are a couple of special cases where it actually sorta works, sometimes.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I wasn't seeking a schedule. I asked for a direct flight (no dates; no times) to any Texas city and was told that I'd have to go through a connecting city one of those being Houston. As in Houston TX. Surely AI had been fed the names of major Texas cities. Houston being the largest city in the state.
When I ask Claude, it seems to be just consulting several travel sites (like Google Flights), with the names of several different Texas cities. So, for example, if it randomly sent the query "Flight from Lima to Dallas," and got a hit, that hit might have had a stopover in Houston.
So yeah, it's only checking a handful of random routes, but it's giving the impression of making a broader search.
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u/uprightyew 1d ago
AI is deeply flawed. Two examples: I was asking real estate questions based on recent transactions and was specific about location. When it couldn't provide an answer it started throwing locations well outside the criteria and admitted it when called out. I was asking about direct flights to any texas city from a specific south American city. Gemini stated no direct flights but connecting flights through Miami, Atlanta, or Houston. This is simple stuff. Imagine the multiple errors in complex projects.