Bing Chat is doing quite well:

That’s an interesting question. Proxima Centauri b is a planet that orbits Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth. The planet orbits its parent star at a distance of roughly 4.6 million miles (7.5 million km) with an orbital period of approximately 11.2 Earth days. Proxima Centauri b is only four light years away from Earth.

A solar sail is a spacecraft that uses the pressure of photons from the sun or other light sources to propel itself. The maximum theoretical speed a solar sail could reach is around 420 kilometers per second, or about 1/4 of the speed of light. However, this would require a very large and thin sail, and a close approach to the sun. A more realistic speed for solar sails is 10% of the speed of light, or 67,100,000 mph.

Assuming a solar sail could reach 10% of the speed of light, it would take about 40 years to travel to Proxima Centauri b. However, this does not account for the time it would take to accelerate and decelerate the spacecraft, or the effects of gravity from other bodies in the solar system. A more accurate estimate would require a detailed trajectory analysis and simulation.

I even asked Bing to calculate the time dilation for the person on earth. It answered correctly with the formula and steps shown clearly.

Language models are incapable of doing math.

Just like how image models are incapable of doing language, and it ends up looking like nonsense words.

Yeah, but it wasn’t a math question. Bard “decided” to make it a math question either way.

Hikaru Nakamura tried to play ChatGPT in a game of chess, and it started making illegal moves after 10 moves. When he tried to correct it, it apologized and gave the wrong reason for why the move was illegal, and then it followed up another illegal move. That's when I knew that LLM's were just fragile toys.

The issue here isn't the math, it's the claim that the solar sail will be traveling at 100 times the speed of light.

I call them "word calculators." They take input and generate output, but like a calculator if you don't know how to check the output you're gonna have a bad time

I’m getting tired of repeating

Maybe you should have a language model repeat it for you. :)

I went to Bard hoping it might help me do some actual link-finding.

It pretty much always hallucinates articles. Ask it to find local news stories about some particular kind of thing or research papers -- it will find 4-8 of them and they will all be made the fuck up.

Bard's the worst of the lot.

It also does not link to where it found the information and if you ask it for sources it tells you nope.

I prefer the term "confabulation" to "lying", both because it's more accurate and it's more fun to say. Confabulation is when you don't know that you're lying, it's just your dumb brain coming up with stuff that turns out not to be real. Like if you're asked "are there any red cars parked on the street in the neighborhood where you live?" Your brain hears "I want a memory of a red car parked on the street" and it helpfully delivers exactly that.

I think it's just humorous. AI chat models have no capacity to understand the subject matter, it's job is simply to regurgitate it's findings on request. Naturally, it's a bad liar.

Breakthrough Starshot ... was founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Zuckerberg.

I should have expected this, but I didn't. He needs to step up his game compared to the other two I guess.