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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2085 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

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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I am currently doing some research into historical details for a video game using major LLMs and it's almost great. They give you great answers, explain their reasoning and suggest interesting angles to explore. Much better than Google, which has gotten terrible at pointing me at good primary and secondary sources.

The only problem is that they give you completely different answers! Of course, I could just rely on how plausible their answers sound (if they can fool me, they can fool the players), but I am too neurotic for that.

How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?

P.S. Lem was fucking prescient. I know Vinge had the same idea, but Lem was there first.

How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?

Which ones are you using primarily? With thinking and web search, they all now extensively cite their work, right? If a claim is missing a source, just ask for it to find one. And then, yes, I read the sources. If I don't like what I'm reading, I tell it to go find better sources.

If I'm far outside my expertise, I sometimes have two models debate each other by proxy. If one model claims X, I just tell it I've read Y somewhere and to explain where the discrepancy is coming from.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek. I think the first one doesn't let you combine thinking and web search. Gemini seems to be the one that likes to confidently answer every question in great detail the most.

They're definitely vastly improved, but I've still been burned recently. Both Grok and ChatGPT independently invented hallucinated time mandates (2000 and 2250, respectively) when fed in this, this, and this. To be fair, that's a hard enough problem that the FAA's gotten pushback over a proposed regulation not just because of normal problems like cost and necessity, but because literally zero mechanics can understand the charts and formula. It's one of the worst formatted set of PDFs I've ever seen, and I've worked with badly-translated Chinese microchip docs.

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