Did ChatGPT come up with Trump’s tariff rate formula? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same formula for reciprocal tariff calculations, several X users claim.
Just a moment...
Artificial Generalized Incompetence
I mean, I'm not going to spend time trying to duplicate their results, but it wouldn't even slightly surprise me. Cops have been using ChatGPT to streamline their bullshit cop-lingo incident reports, to the extent that it's caught the notice of lawyers and judges... 100% I believe that the dolts who shit out Trump's tariff rates used it too.
There's a ton of papers on Google Scholar that still include phases like "Let's delve into..." That show otnwas used not to translate, but for the research itself.
And someone did replicate this, and ChatGPT 4o, o1, Claude and Grok all came up with the same formula for an "easy" way to calculate tariffs.
How about the outlet checks and finds out?
I did, and I couldn’t get low-temperature Gemini or a local LLM to replicate it, and not all the tariffs seem to be based on the trade deficit ratio, though some suspiciously are.
Sorry, but this is a button of mine, outlets that ask stupidly easy to verify questions but dont even try. No, just cite people on Reddit and Twitter…
They tariffed places with no people in them.
though some suspiciously are.
Some? A huge portion are. Numerous others have replicated it with visual proof. I agree that the news sites should be verifying it, but NYT did and also documented their proof.
Because the article is likely just more GenAI vomit, and an LLM doesn't have any degree of deductive reasoning ability to begin with.
TBH it's probably human written.
I used to write small articles for a tech news outlet on the side (HardOCP), and the entire site went under well before the AI boom because no one can compete with conveyer belts of of thoughtless SEO garbage, especially when Google promotes it.
Point being, this was a problem well before the rise of LLMs.
Are you annoyed that they didn't try to replicate it, or that they're disparaging LLMs?
That they didn’t try to replicate it.
what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised and they just refer to that because they have nothing else to base the questions about that specific topic on?
I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is. It wouldnt surprise me if it was based only to whatever happened to be going through the madmans mind at the time.
The numbers come from an overly simple way to level out trade deficits.
So if I sell you $100 in goods and you sell me $120 dollars in goods, I'm "losing" money, therefore 20% tariff (tax to sell me something). In reality, you're going to increase your prices and sell me $140 worth of the same stuff.
All the AIs did was expand this to a global scale, what's insane to me is that the math adds up. It doesn't take an AI to do this though, some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing. Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.
Isn't his weird formula the trade defecit percentage + Tariffs from that country divided by two?
Yeah, this makes sense to me. ChatGPT isn't crunching the numbers, looking at conservative ideology, foreign policy goals and media optics before recommending the ideal number for the trump admin to implement. Instead it's just looking for the most widely publicized set of numbers in relation to that query and regurgitating that.
what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised
Then I'd ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we've got an AI that's built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it's just as likely they're ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.
That's sort of the problem with AI. There's no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that's already inelegant and resource intensive).
I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.
The problem is less that we don't know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don't know either. They're fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don't even know if they've got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.
They're fishing for answers in the answer pond,
Except, they've actually dropped their lines in the stupidity toilet.
One would have had to ask the ai about it before all this to know where it might be getting its information from
Did ChatGPT come up with the color of the sky? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same color for the sky, several X users claim.
Yea but we can all agree on sky color but the numbers Trump posted are questionable at best
the point is chat GPT is trained on ideas people have already had. it's not inventing Trump's economic theory out of thin air.
The sky color is part of the training data. How did the LLMs include the training data before it existed?
All the search engines search the same internet, find similar text, output it using similar formulas.
Except these AI systems aren't search engines, and people treating them like they are is really dangerous
They are. They record the data, stealing it. They search it (or characteristics of it), and reprint it (in whole or in part) upon request.
Viewing it as something creative, or other than a glorified remixing machine is the problem. It's a search engine for creative works they've stolen, and reproduce parts of.
They search the data-space of what they're "trained" on (our content, the content of human beings), and reproduce statistically defined elements of it.
They're search engines that have stolen what they're "trained on", and reproduce it as "results" (be that images or written text, it has to come from our collective data. Data we created). It's theft. It's copywrite fraud. Same as google stealing books (which they had to he sued over the digitizing of, and enter into rights agreements over).
Searching and reproducing content they've already recorded (aka stolen without permission), is absolutely part of what they are. Part of what they do.
Don't stan for them or pretend they're creative, intelligent, or doing anything original.
The real lie is that it's "training data". It's not. It's the internet, and it's not training - it's theft, it's stealing and copying (violating copyright). Digital stealing, and processing into a "data set", a representation or repackaging of our original works.
The basic graphing technology used by AI is the same pioneered by Alta Vista and optimized by Google years later. We've added a layer of abstraction through user I/O, such that you get a formalized text response encapsulating results rather than a series of links containing related search terms. But the methodology used to harvest, hash, and sort results is still all rooted in graph theory.
The difference between then and now is that back then you'd search "Horse" in Alta Vista and getting a dozen links ranging from ranches and vet clinics to anime and porn. Now, you get a text blob that tries to synthesize all the information in those sources down to a few paragraphs of relevant text.
.... and generating AI porn, so much AI porn, it will destroy humanity with so much AI porn
Actually, it was the Palantir Gotham threat model... which has a backend to a private chatgpt model :(
I tried replicating this myself, and got no similar results. It took enough coaxing just to get the model to not specify existing tariffs, then to make it talk about entire nations instead of tariffs on specific sectors, then after that it mostly just did 10, 12, and 25% for most of the answers.
I have no doubt this is possible, but until I see some actual amount of proof, this is entirely hearsay.
They are reciprocal so should be the same as what other nations are charging the US. The formula for them is: tariff for X = X's tariff on US, so no surprise here.
Also no surprise here that you didn't actually read the article.
Elude
The current tariff approach by the republican administration does not include the tariffs on US exports. They are not included in the formula.
