Saw a good point about this the other day. The argument was that a kid seeing one cat has a whole lifetime of other context built in, like knowing what fur is or what eyes look like. These models start with a blank slate, so yeah, they need a ton of data to build those basic ideas from scratch. It's a different kind of learning, but calling it just copying feels a bit simple, gavin365. They are finding patterns, but so are our brains, just way more efficiently. The real trick is whether they can use those patterns in new ways like a person can.

Yeah that's a real problem with any kind of database or AI thing. Read an article a while back about a library that digitized its old local paper, and the search results made it look like the town was stuck in the 1950s because that's when the paper was most active. They had to actively go find newer community bulletins and school newsletters to add, otherwise anyone researching would get a totally wrong idea. For your church bot, maybe you need a checklist of all the big areas the church works in now, like the food bank or youth programs, and then go hunt for source material that talks about that recent stuff. It's like you have to force yourself to look for the gaps in your own knowledge, which is super hard lol.