alt Hacker News> “Bag of words” is a also a useful heuristic for predicting where an AI will do well and where it will fail. “Give me a list of the ten worst transportation disasters in North America” is an easy task for a bag of words, because disasters are well-documented. On the other hand, “Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?” is a hard task for a bag of words, because the bag just doesn’t contain that many words on the topic
It is... such a retrospective narrative. It's so obvious that the author learned about this example first than came with the reasoning later, just to fit in his view of LLM.
Imaging if ChatGPT answered this question correctly. Would that change the author's view? Of course not! They'll just say:
> “Bag of words” is a also a useful heuristic for predicting where an AI will do well and where it will fail. Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?” is an easy task for a bag of words, because the information has appeared in the words it memorizes.
I highly doubt this author has predicted that "bag of Words" can do image editing before OpenAI released that.
Replies
When sensitivity analysis of ordinary least-squares regression became a thing it was also a "retrospective narrative". That seems reasonable for detecting fundamental issues with statistical models of the world. This point generalizes even if the concrete example falls down.
Your conclusion seems super unfair to the offer, particularly your assumption, without reason as far as I can tell, that the author would obstinately continue to advocate for their conclusion in the face of new, contrary evidence.
I could not tell you who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when, because of all the words I've ever heard, the combination of words that contains the information has not appeared.
GIGO has an obvious Nothing-In-Nothing-Out trivial case.
Isn't it pretty clear just from the first paragraph that the author has graphomania? Such people don't really care about the thesis, they care about the topic and how many literary devices they can fit into the article.
I tested this with ChatGPT-5.1 and Gemini 3.0. Both correctly (according to Wikipedia at least) stated that George Olshevsky assigned it to its own genus in 1991.
This is because there are many words about how to do web searches.