> Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood
Its an extremely well understood piece of technology and has been for decades outside of Toyota. Here is a 2005 paper that accurately models the fundamental behavior of the Prius HSD [1]. There are dozens of pages that explain it in various detail, including ones with live simulators of the power split device. [2] There are tons of forum threads of amateur Prius owners chatting about the internals.
I don't say this as a dunk, but to point out that a person's perception of chatGPT's capabilities are heavily influenced by their familiarity with the domain.
I think you and I have different definitions of not generally well understood. I would be impressed if more than 1 in 1000 people could describe it to the level of "it's a planetary gearbox with 2 electric motors used as inputs and outputs to control the effective gear ratio".
> I would be impressed if more than 1 in 1000 people could describe it
Q: What use is it attempting to measure ChatGPT's capabilities on something vs the average person on the street, or vs the average user with access to google.com? What does that actually tell us?
Maybe I'm showing my age, but if one wanted to learn or discover something, wouldn't one first typically try and find a reliable source/expert in that field or subject?
ahh, I misunderstood what you meant. In that case can you explain to me why its meaningful that chatGPT can sometimes explain things for which there are tons of resources online to learn about them but that a lot of people aren't familiar with? I legitimately just don't understand why that is an interesting bar to clear, especially given that it can also unpredictably lie about some aspects of the thing its explaining.
It would perhaps be interesting if it were such a hard topic that only 1 in 1000 could be capable of understanding it, but I would hazard a guess that most people familiar with the prius who don't understand its drivetrain probably don't understand it because they don't care, not because its too complicated to understand.
Its an extremely well understood piece of technology and has been for decades outside of Toyota. Here is a 2005 paper that accurately models the fundamental behavior of the Prius HSD [1]. There are dozens of pages that explain it in various detail, including ones with live simulators of the power split device. [2] There are tons of forum threads of amateur Prius owners chatting about the internals.
I don't say this as a dunk, but to point out that a person's perception of chatGPT's capabilities are heavily influenced by their familiarity with the domain.
[1] https://www.engr.uvic.ca/~mech459/Pub_References/01500979.pd...
[2] http://eahart.com/prius/psd/