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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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If simple double-passing the prompt was sufficient, I imagine the developers would have figured it out a long time ago.

It is, and they have. But this requires twice as much inference, and GPT-4 is already very expensive compared to the set of internet operations that we intuitively consider in the same class. Then you need to compare the answers and determine whether they match, which requires either manual effort or a third prompt.

This tech just hasn't been around long enough to build products around it. But if and when our civilization gets around to building and iterating a dedicated commercial medical expert product from LLMs, I've little doubt that hallucination will be a solved problem, because the cost of running a whole bunch of parallel prompts and then a subsequent round of prompts to confirm their consistency will be negligible in proportion to the commercial value of the tool.