8 ms·
I think this actually points at a different problem, a problem with LLM users, but only to the extent that it's a problem with people with respect to any questi
by nonameiguess 1y ago
I think this actually points at a different problem, a problem with LLM users, but only to the extent that it's a problem with people with respect to any questions they have to ask any source they consider an authority at all. No LLM, nor any other source on the Internet, nor any other source off the Internet, can give you reliable dosage guidelines for copper peptides because this is information that is not known to humans. There is some answer to the question of what response you might expect and how that varies by dose, but without the clinical trials ever having been conducted, it's not an answer anyone actually has. Marketing and popular misconceptions about AI lead to people expecting it to be able to conjure facts out of thin air, perhaps reasoning from first principles using its highly honed model of human physiology.
It's an uncomfortable position to be in trying to biohack your way to a more youthful appearance using treatments that have never been studied in human trials, but that's the reality you're facing. Whatever guidelines you manage to find, whether from the telehealth clinic directly, or from a language model that read the Internet and ingested that along with maybe a few other sources, are generally extrapolated from early rodent studies and all that's being extrapolated is an allometric scaling from rat body to human body of the dosage the researchers actually gave to the rats. What effect that actually had, and how that may or may not translate to humans, is not usually a part of the consideration. To at least some extent, it can't be if the compound was never trialed on humans.
You're basically just going with scale up a dosage to human sized that at least didn't kill the rats. Take that and it probably won't kill you. What it might actually do can't be answered, not by doctors, not by an LLM, not by Wikipedia, not by anecdotes from past biohackers who tried it on themselves. This is not a failure of information retrieval or compression. You're just asking for information that is not known to anyone, so no one can give it to you.
If there's a problem here specific to LLMs, it's that they'll generally give you an answer anyway and will not in any way quantify the extent to which it is probably bullshit and why.
- cj 1y ago> a problem with LLM users I think the flaw here is placing blame on users rather than the service provider. HN is cutting LLM companies slack because we understand the technical limitations making it hard for the LLM to just say “I don’t know”. In any other universe, we would be blaming the service rather than the user. Why don’t we fix LLMs so they don’t spit out garbage when it doesn’t know the answer. Have we given up on that thought?
- simonw 1y agoCurrent frontier LLMs - Claude 4, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 - are massively more likely to say "I don't know" than last year's models.
- cj 1y agoI don’t think I’ve ever seen ChatGPT 5 refuse to answer any prompt I’ve ever given it. I’m doing 20+ chats a day. What’s an example prompt where it will say “idk”? Edit: Just tried a silly one, asking it to tell me about the 8th continent on earth, which doesn’t exist. How difficult is it for the model to just say “sorry, there are only 7 continents”. I think we should expect more from LLMs and stop blaming things on technical limitations. “It’s hard” is getting to be an old excuse considering the amount of money flowing into building these systems.
- simonw 1y agohttps://chatgpt.com/share/68b85035-62ec-8006-ab20-af5931808b62 https://chatgpt.com/share/68b85035-62ec-8006-ab20-af5931808b... - "There are only seven recognized continents on Earth: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America." Here's a recent example of it saying "I don't know" - I asked it to figure out why there was an octopus in a mural about mushrooms: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8507f-cc90-8006-b9d1-c06a2278506d https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8507f-cc90-8006-b9d1-c06a227850... - "I wasn’t able to locate a publicly documented explanation of why Jo Brown (Bernoid) chose to include an octopus amid a mushroom-themed mural."
- cj 1y agoNot sure what your system prompt is, but asking the exact same prompt word for word for me results in a response talking about "Zealandia, a continent that is 93% submerged underwater." The 2nd example isn't all that impressive since you're asking it to provide you something very specific. It succeeded in not hallucinating. It didn't succeed at saying "I'm not sure" in the face of ambiguity. I want the LLM to respond more like a librarian: When they know something for sure, they tell you definitively, otherwise they say "I'm not entirely sure, but I can point you to where you need to look to get the information you need."