[ranger_danger]

> LLMs will return faulty or imprecise information at times

To be fair, so do humans and wikipedia.

[redserk]

It appears there's an expectation many non-tech people have that humans can be incorrect but refuse to hold LLMs to the same standard, despite warnings.

[soraminazuki]

Well, even among tech people, equating the role of computers to be that of a crystal ball would've gotten anyone laughed out of the tech community a few years ago. Yet, here we are.

[internetter]

On average, it is reasonable to expect that wikipedia will be more correct than an LLM

[yfvcdycdybguibg]

Doubtful.

[qayxc]

How? The LLM is trained on the same information. In a lossy way, I might add. So how on Earth would the LLM be as reliable, let alone even more so?

[Timwi]

I'm not surprised, given the depiction of artificial intelligence in science fiction. Characters like Data in TNG, Number 5 in Short Circuit, etc., are invariably depicted as having perfect memory, infallible logic, super speed of information processing, etc. Real-life AI has turned out very differently, but anyone who isn't exposed to it full time, but was exposed to some of those works of science fiction, will reasonably make the assumptions promulgated by the science fiction.

[ileonichwiesz]

We have decades of experience with computers being deterministic machines that will return a correct output given a correct input and program.

I can’t multiply large numbers in my head, but if I plug 273*8113 into a calculator, I can expect it to give me the same, correct answer every time.

Now suddenly it’s „Well yes, it can make mistakes, but so can humans! Sometimes it’ll be right, but also sometimes it’ll make up a random answer, kinda like humans!”, which I suppose is true, but it’s also nonsense - the very reason I was using technology (in that case, a calculator) to do my work is because I wanted to avoid mistakes that a human (me) would make without it. If a piece of tech can’t be reliably expected to perform a task better than a person can on their own, then what’s really the point?

[troupo]

Because we still assume that computers are precise things that do what you tell them to do, and react in predictable(-ish) ways.

We don't know how to deal with a non-deterministic output from a computer.

Even here on HN you will see people whose world view is basically "LLMs are good and how dare you doubt them"

[dfedbeef]

Especially now