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Relatedly, during the little tiff below (not trying to repeat it here, just a relevant experience), phailyoor and I had some back and forth about what date exactly was Fauci appointed director of NIAID. The source Grokipedia cited for the exact date only gave the year, and I couldn't find any sources that actually did give the exact date, and my suspicion was a hallucination. Finally, I landed on one: Wikipedia. And, despite my many misgivings about it, I do trust that to be accurate, and I'm guessing Grok just grabbed it from there.
Digging deeper, though, even Wikipedia doesn't seem to provide a source for that date. Where's it coming from? I pull up an LLM--ChatGPT, not Grok--and it's able to pinpoint the PDF of the official press release where the date is coming from. Which, as it turns out, is linked on the Wikipedia article, but buried in a distant unrelated citation that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise.
My takeaway is pretty close to yours, but models are rapidly improving. That's not something that could have been done a year ago.
(I'd update the Wiki page's date with the source, but the page is currently locked.)
The main thing that is improving them is agentic AI - i.e., they can now actually do web searches and other external reference lookups, rather than just making up whatever isn't in their training data.
That's slightly unfair - they've also done things like tweak fine tuning and post training so that ambiguity isn't penalized so much, and also there's some smaller advancements with the mathematical underpinnings regarding what to do in certain "low-confidence" scenarios, for lack of a better concise descriptor. That means that even some no-tool-use models are also moderately better at hallucination resistance, though it's obviously very far from a solved problem (the most obvious confabulations however usually aren't happening anymore, unless you're
a shit model like Grokprioritizing different things like Grok)More options
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