3 ms·

In some cases, sure, you are absolutely right. But in many cases “application you can rely on” depends on the context, the field, and user expectations. I “rel

In some cases, sure, you are absolutely right. But in many cases “application you can rely on” depends on the context, the field, and user expectations. I “rely” on weather report apps but expect inaccuracies. I rely on medical tests results but expect FDRs of about .05. In contrast, I expect financial apps to have very low FDRs. I use Claude as a tool to explore research areas and topics. Here is an example of a recent prompt: “Please provide references to papers that have reported swelling of brain tissue (increase in volume) in neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s using MRI methods.” After a back-and-forth I got just what I needed, and more easily than a PubMed query—-two references that demonstrate early-stage volume increases in some parts of the brain of adults with presenilin 1 mutations.

simonw 2y ago
It's important to understand what's going on here. Claude isn't providing references because it has a copy of the papers and knows their URLs. It's instead providing references because enough of the OTHER stuff in the training data (which is entirely undocumented but we can assume includes a scrape of the web, blog posts, Reddit, other papers etc) talked about those papers in a way that provided context on the paper and enough of a title/URL that Claude could usefully return that. By its nature then you'll only ever find references to VERY popular papers that way. That might be what you want! But you shouldn't expect Claude to be able to dig into the lesser known research around a topic based exclusively on its model weights. For that you'd be much better off with a system like Gemini Deep Research: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-research/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea...
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  Not consistent with my empirical tests. I asked Claude for references on the demographics of wild rodent populations—-not exactly a hot topic, and all four references were spot on, including two not even listed in PubMed.

simonw 2y ago

It's important to understand what's going on here. Claude isn't providing references because it has a copy of the papers and knows their URLs. It's instead providing references because enough of the OTHER stuff in the training data (which is entirely undocumented but we can assume includes a scrape of the web, blog posts, Reddit, other papers etc) talked about those papers in a way that provided context on the paper and enough of a title/URL that Claude could usefully return that. By its nature then you'll only ever find references to VERY popular papers that way. That might be what you want! But you shouldn't expect Claude to be able to dig into the lesser known research around a topic based exclusively on its model weights. For that you'd be much better off with a system like Gemini Deep Research: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-research/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea...

robwwilliams 2y ago
Not consistent with my empirical tests. I asked Claude for references on the demographics of wild rodent populations—-not exactly a hot topic, and all four references were spot on, including two not even listed in PubMed.