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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2891 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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hallucination rates are close to negligible

This has not been the case for me, unless you count “yes, you are correct, it seems that x is actually y” follow-ups when specifically prompted as negligible, which I would not. The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains. No specific examples, just my general experience over the past few weeks.

The appropriate response to hallucination handwringing from luddites is “it doesn’t matter”, not “it’s not happening”, by the way.

I'm not aware of a comprehensive hallucination benchmark, at least one that has been updated for recent SOTA models. If there was, I'd reference it, but hallucination rates have dropped drastically since the 3.5 days (something like 40% of its citations were hallucinate).

I almost never run into them, though I only check important claims. With something like GPT-5T, I'd estimate it's correct north of 95% of the time on factual questions, though I'm not sure if that means 96% or 99.9%.

The appropriate response to hallucination handwringing from luddites is “it doesn’t matter”, not “it’s not happening”, by the way.

Uh.. I don't think anything I've said should be interpreted as "they don't happen". Right now, they're uncommon enough that I think you should check only claims that matter, not the exact amount of salt to put in your soup.

I never ask AI anything factual at this point without enabling "search" and checking the source for whatever load-bearing point of evidence I'm looking for

It's not as fast as "type question, read answer" but it's still faster than the best alternative, Google and read 2-4 sources of potentially slop / not your exact question

The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains.

Works on people too though.

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