In the last seven months or so, artificial intelligence has taken a large step forward. You may have noticed a sudden surge in media about these systems. Something that has surprised me, though, is how few people I know have actually tried them. So I thought I would share an example of why they’re so powerful.

Example: Researching electric cars

There are a lot of things to consider when buying a new car, but for me the most important elements are the price, and the range the vehicle has. There is some nuance here: Tesla over-estimates its range, while Ford is apparently very accurate (at least according to MKBHD’s YouTube channels). But gathering this information used to be hard, and is now a simple matter of asking Bing for that information:

This was gained just by asking Bing the following:

make a table showing the ratio of price and range of electric cars available in the USA

Then I asked Bing to add another column with this request:

Make the same table, but add the ratio of Range and price

The future

This is the future, I think. Any publicly available information can be manipulated in this way by a machine. And, more interestingly, the results are not always identical, because it’s ‘thinking’ through the answers, not running a prescriptive algorithm.

This should make your life easier, if you ever need to compile information like this. You should always check the results, but once you have them, that’s much easier than pulling the information together in the first place. Try it the next time you need to do something that involves gathering and manipulating information.

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I write short stories and oþer fiction – check þem out at shortbooks.online

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