4 ms·
Taken from the blog: > Why are we talking about “graduate and PhD-level intelligence” in these systems if they can’t find and verify relevant links — even dire
by motorest 1y ago
Taken from the blog:
> Why are we talking about “graduate and PhD-level intelligence” in these systems if they can’t find and verify relevant links — even directly after a search?
This is my pet peeves, and recently OpenAI's models seem to have become very militant in how they stand by and push their obviously hallucinated sources. I'm talking about hallucinating answers, when pressed to cite sources they also hallucinate URLs that never existed, when repeatedly prompted to verify how the are hallucinating the stick to their clearly wrong output, and ultimately fall back to claiming they were right but the URL somehow changed even though it never existed ever.
In order to start talking about PhD-level intelligence, in the very least these LLMs must support PhD-level context-seeking and information verification. It is not enough to output a wall of text that reads quite fluently. You must stick to verifiable facts.
- thom 1y agoI have search enabled 100% of the time with ChatGPT and would never go back to raw-dogging LLM citations. O3 especially has passed the threshold of “not always annoying”. Had an argument with Gemini yesterday where it was insisting on some hallucinated implementation of a function even while giving me a GitHub link to the correct source.
- genewitch 1y ago[flagged]
- Orygin 1y agoLanguages evolve and words get new meanings all the time.
- genewitch 1y agoYeah the meaning was what I said until about 2 weeks ago when someone went viral talking about air travel without a cellphone. Do vulgarities often become accepted?
- javcasas 1y agoAre we allowed to say "sex" or "kill"? Or do we have to start s*lf-c*nsoring everything? Anyway, my last search to how to un-alive children processes gave me nothing. I wonder if those m*n pages are actually wr*tten by pr*f*ss*n*ls.
- genewitch 1y agoalgospeak originated on Tiktok, with all that implies. You couldn't post videos about sexual assault, suicides, murders, any of that directly, so people started self-censoring and using words - unalive maybe came from Deadpool in 2013? I'm not real interested in the actual etymology right now. and you jest but there's been pushes to change things like "master/slave", "kill", "whitelist/blacklist", and the like to something different. I don't know how much traction, and i may have been tricked by april 1st posts or something.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- piva00 1y agoSome of them do, yes. Tone policing has always been around as well, just surprises me to happen in an online forum about "vulgarities".
- genewitch 1y agoI apologize if it came off as tone policing. "Raw dog" sounds innocuous, if a bit strange. There was a radio station that had an internet stream out of Topeka Kansas called "Raw Dog Radio" that was a comedy station/stream; as an example - but it was a direct reference to the sexual connotation. For people who don't know, and notice that "raw dogging" is entering zeitgeist, maybe they'll say it because it sounds silly. It was merely a warning about what it means. The "definition shift" really isn't, people are comparing taking a flight without water, cellphones, etc to sex without a condom (Doesn't matter, flew through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, don't care!) The person i replied to was comparing using an LLM without RAG to risky sex. I'd also avoid saying "So. How are we going to fuck this pig?" in a meeting about infra problems.
- wesselbindt 1y agoAre you being paid to post here? They're giving me nothing. Cheapskates.
- genewitch 1y agoif this refers to how often i post in bursts, i have wicked insomnia. I really should remove my credentials from the HN app on my phone. if this is what you meant, you're the first person to call me out!
- Terr_ 1y agoI wouldn't use it in a workplace either, perhaps not at all, but here is a pseudonymous forum. The expectations—or repercussions—of decorum aren't the same.
- thom 1y agoI think the usage and all its connotations are perfectly cromulent here.
- vanschelven 1y agoIncluding literal 404s... As an outsider it has always struck me as absurd that they don't just do the equivalent of wget over all provided sources.
- alkonaut 1y agoOr why the LLM doesn’t do a lookup into a subset of the training data as a database and reject the output if it seems to be wrong. A billion of the most urls and the entirety of Wikipedia, arkiv and stackoverflow would go a long way.
- vrighter 1y agoIf that could be done, then we would be using that and skipping the llms entirely
- krzat 1y agoThe approach of generating something and then looking for hallucinations is just stupid. To validate the output I have to be an expert. How do I become an expert if rely on LLMs? It's a dead end.
- motorest 1y ago> The approach of generating something and then looking for hallucinations is just stupid. To validate the output I have to be an expert. No. You only need to check for sources, and then verify these sources exist and they support the claims. It's the very definition of "fact". In some cases, all you need to do is check if a URL that was cited does exist.
- capnrefsmmat 1y agoIf the output is interpreting sources rather than just regurgitating quotes from them, you need to exert judgment to verify they support its claims. When the LLM output is about some highly technical subject, it can require expert knowledge just to judge whether the source supports the claims.
- vrighter 1y ago"and suport the claims" is doing some *extremely* heavy lifting there. I can't write a software program, give the source to the greengrocer and expect him to be able to say anything about its quality. Just like I can't really say much about vegetables.
- nkrisc 1y agoSeems like the LLM is giving correct output if it’s generating a plausible string of tokens in response to your string of tokens.
- motorest 1y ago> Seems like the LLM is giving correct output if it’s generating a plausible string of tokens in response to your string of tokens. No. If you prompt it to get a response and then you ask it to cite sources, if it outputs broken links that never existed then it clearly failed to deliver correct output.
- nkrisc 1y agoBut are the links plausible text given the training data? If the purpose is to accurately cite sources, how is it even possible to hallucinate them? Seems like folks are expecting way too much from these tools. They are not intelligent. Useful, perhaps.
- Scarblac 1y agoSeems that's just expecting things that LLMs were not designed for. It's a token producer based on trained weights, it doesn't use any sources. Even if it were "fixed" so that it only generates URLs that exist, it's still incorrect because it did not use any sources so those URLs are not sources.
- soco 1y agoThen let's face it: LLMs were not designed to give proper answers. Now that we settled this and the emperor is obviously naked, what?
- sincerecook 1y ago[dead]
- vrighter 1y ago"correct" for an llm means "fits the statistical distributions in the training data" "correct" for you is "truth that corresponds to the real world" They are two very different things. The llm's output is, very much, correct. Because it was never meant to mean anything other than similarity of probability distributions. It's not what you wanted, but that doesn't make it incorrect. You're just under a wrong assumption about what you were asking for. You were asking for something that looks like it could be true. Even if you ask it to not hallucinate, you're just asking it to make it look like it is not hallucinating. Meanwhile you thought you were asking for the actual, real, answer to your question.
- esafak 1y agoThis is trivial to overcome by using a REST client to verify the link through MCP, and by caching results it wouldn't even add much latency.