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> I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking. I know you probably meant "augment fact checking" here, but using LLM
by jkubicek 1y ago
> I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking.
I know you probably meant "augment fact checking" here, but using LLMs for answering factual questions is the single worst use-case for LLMs.
- Spivak 1y agoIt doesn't replace legitimate source funding but LLM vs the top Google results is no contest which is more about Google or the current state of the web than the LLMs at this point.
- simianwords 1y agoDisagree. You have to try really hard and go very niche and deep for it to get some fact wrong. In fact I'll ask you to provide examples: use GPT 5 with thinking and search disabled and get it to give you inaccurate facts for non niche, non deep topics. Non niche meaning: something that is taught at undergraduate level and relatively popular. Non deep meaning you aren't going so deep as to confuse even humans. Like solving an extremely hard integral. Edit: probably a bad idea because this sort of "challenge" works only statistically not anecdotally. Still interesting to find out.
- JustExAWS 1y agoI literally just had ChatGPT create a Python program and it used .ends_with instead of .endswith. This was with ChatGPT 5. I mean it got a generic built in function of one of the most popular languages in the world wrong.
- simianwords 1y ago"but using LLMs for answering factual questions" this was about fact checking. Of course I know LLM's are going to hallucinate in coding sometimes.
- JustExAWS 1y agoSo it isn’t a “fact” that the built in Python function that tests whether a string ends with a substring is “endswith”? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect If you know that a source isn’t to be believed in an area you know about, why would you trust that source in an area you don’t know about? Another funny anecdote, ChatGPT just got the Gell-Man effect wrong. https://chatgpt.com/share/68a0b7af-5e40-8010-b1e3-ee9ff3c8cb6b https://chatgpt.com/share/68a0b7af-5e40-8010-b1e3-ee9ff3c8cb...
- simianwords 1y agoIt got it right with thinking which was the challenge I posed. https://chatgpt.com/share/68a0b897-f8dc-800b-8799-9be2a8ad5433 https://chatgpt.com/share/68a0b897-f8dc-800b-8799-9be2a8ad54...
- OnlineGladiator 1y agoThe point you're missing is it's not always right. Cherry-picking examples doesn't really bolster your point. Obviously it works for you (or at least you think it does), but I can confidently say it's fucking god-awful for me.
- simianwords 1y agoAm I really the one cherry picking? Please read the thread.
- OnlineGladiator 1y agoYes. If someone gives an example of it not working, and you reply "but that example worked for me" then you're cherry picking when it works. Just because it worked for you does not mean it works for other people. If I ask ChatGPT a question and it gives me a wrong answer, ChatGPT is the fucking problem.
- malfist 1y agoMaybe you should fact check your AI outputs more if you think it only hallucinates in niche topics
- simianwords 1y agoThe accuracy is high enough that I don't have to fact check too often.
- collingreen 1y agoWithout some exploratory fact checking how do you estimate how high the accuracy is and how often you should be fact checking to maintain a good understanding?
- simianwords 1y agoI did initial tests so that I don't have to do it anymore.
- malfist 1y agoIf there's one thing that's constant it's that these systems change.
- jibal 1y agoEveryone else has done tests that indicate that you do.
- glenstein 1y agoAnd this is why you can't use personal anecdotes to settle questions of software performance. Comment sections are never good at being accountable for how vibes-driven they are when selecting which anecdotes to prefer.
- platevoltage 1y agoI totally get that you meant this in a nuanced way, but at face value it sort of reads like... Joe Rogan has high enough accuracy that I don't have to fact check too often. Newsmax has high enough accuracy that I don't have to fact check too often, etc. If you accept the output as accurate, why would fact checking even cross your mind?
- password54321 1y agoThis was true before it could use search. Now the worst use-case is for life advice because it will contradict itself a 100 times over while sounding confident each time on life-altering decisions.
- rich_sasha 1y agoI disagree. Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right. For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time. Once you get an answer, it is easy enough to verify it.
- mrandish 1y agoI agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you can specify the domain in the prompt it'll usually select the relevant meanings of multi-meaning terms - which isn't possible in general purpose web search engines. So it helps narrow down closer to the specific needle I want in the haystack. As other posters said, relying on LLMs for factual answers to challenging questions is error prone. I just want the LLM to give me the links and I'll then assess veracity like a normal web search. I think a web search interface allowed disambiguating multi-meaning keywords might be even better.
- yojo 1y agoI’ll give you another use: LLMs are really good at unearthing the “unknown unknowns.” If I’m learning a new topic (coding or not) summarizing my own knowledge to an LLM and then asking “what important things am I missing” almost always turns up something I hadn’t considered. You’ll still want to fact check it, and there’s no guarantee it’s comprehensive, but I can’t think of another tool that provides anything close without hours of research.
- elictronic 1y agoCoworkers and experts in a field. I can trust them much more but the better they are the less access you have.
- 1y ago
- mkozlows 1y agoModern ChatGPT will (typically on its own; always if you instruct it to) provide inline links to back up its answers. You can click on those if it seems dubious or if it's important, or trust it if it seems reasonably true and/or doesn't matter much. The fact that it provides those relevant links is what allows it to replace Google for a lot of purposes.
- pram 1y agoIt does citations (Grok and Claude etc do too) but I've found when I read the source on some stuff (GitHub discussions and so on) it sometimes actually has nothing to do with what the LLM said. I've actually wasted a lot of time trying to find the actual spot in a threaded conversation where the example was supposedly stated.
- sarchertech 1y agoSame experience with Google search AI. The links frequently don’t support the assertions, they’ll just say something that might show up in a google search for the assertion. For example if I’m asking about whether a feature exists in some library, the AI says yes it does and links to a forum where someone is asking the same question I did, but no one answered (this has happened multiple times).
- Nemi 1y agoIt is funny, Perplexity seems to work much better in this use case for me. When I want some sort of "conclusive answer", I use Gemini pro (just what I have available). It is good with coding and formulating thoughts, rewriting text, so on. But when I want to actually search for content on the web for, say, product research or opinions on a topic, Perplexity is so much better than either Gemini or google search AI. It lists reference links for each block of assertions that are EASILY clicked on (unlike Gemini or search AI, where the references are just harder to click on for some reason, not the least of which is that they OPEN IN THE SAME TAB where Perplexity always opens on a new tab). This is often a reddit specific search as I want people's opinions on something. Perplexity's UI for search specifically is the main thing it does just so much better than google's offering is the one thing going for it. I think there is some irony there. Full disclosure, I don't use Anthropic or OpenAI, so this may not be the case for those products.
- cm2012 1y agoThey outperform asking humans, unless you are asking an expert. On average
- lottin 1y agoWhen I have a question, I don't usually "ask" that question and expect an answer. I figure out the answer. I certainly don't ask the question to a random human.
- gnerd00 1y agoyou ask yourself .. for most people, that means closer to average reply, from yourself, when you try to figure it out. There is a working paper from McKinnon Consulting in Canada that states directly that their definition of "General AI" is when the machine can match or exceed fifty percent of humans who are likely to be employed for a certain kind of job. It implies that low-education humans are the test for doing many routine jobs, and if the machine can beat 50% (or more) of them with some consistency, that is it.
- lottin 1y agoBy definition the average answer will be average, that's kind of a tautology. The point is that figuring things out is an essential intellectual skill. Figuring things out will make you smarter. Having a machine figure things out for you will make you dumber. By the way, doing a better job than the average human is NOT a sign of intelligence. Through history we have invented plenty of machines that are better at certain tasks than us. None of them are intelligent.
- oldsecondhand 1y agoThe most useful feature of LLMs is giving sources (with URL preferably). It can cut through a lot of SEO crap, and you still get to factcheck just like with a Google search.
- IgorPartola 1y agoFrom what I have seen, a lot of what it does is read articles also written by AI or forum posts with all the good and bad that comes with that.
- sefrost 1y agoI like using LLMs and I have found they are incredibly useful writing and reviewing code at work. However, when I want sources for things, I often find they link to pages that don't fully (or at all) back up the claims made. Sometimes other websites do, but the sources given to me by the LLM often don't. They might be about the same topic that I'm discussing, but they don't seem to always validate the claims. If they could crack that problem it would be a major major win for me.
- joegibbs 1y agoIt would be difficult to do with a raw model, but a two-step method in a chat interface would work - first the model suggests the URLs, tool call to fetch them and return the actual text of the pages, then the response can be based on that.
- mh- 1y agoI prototyped this a couple months ago using OpenAI APIs with structured output. I had it consume a "deep thought" style output (where it provides inline citations with claims), and then convert that to a series of assertions and a pointer to a link that supposedly supports the assertion. I also split out a global "context" (the original meaning) paragraph to provide anything that would help the next agents understand what they're verifying. Then I fanned this out to separate (LLM) contexts and each agent verified only one assertion::source pair, with only those things + the global context and some instructions I tuned via testing. It returned a yes/no/it's complicated for each one. Then I collated all these back in and enriched the original report with challenges from the non-yes agent responses. That's as far as I took it. It only took a couple hours to build and it seemed to work pretty well.
- lightbendover 1y ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 1y agoIt covers 99% of my use cases. And it is googling behind the scenes in ways I would never think to query and far faster. When I need to cite a court case, well the truth is I'll still use GPT or a similar LLM, but I'll scrutinize it more and at the bare minimum make sure the case exists and is about the topic presented, before trying to corroborate the legal strategy with a new context window, different LLM, google, reddit, and different lawyer. At least I'm no longer relying on my own understanding, and what 1 lawyer procedurally generates for me.
- marsven_422 1y ago[dead]
- SirHumphrey 1y agoMost of the value I got from google was just becoming aware that something exists. LLM-s do far better in this regard. Once I know something exists it's usually easy enough to use traditional search to find official documentation or a more reputable source.