[jakewins]

I asked Gemini the other day to research and summarise the pinout configuration for CANbus outputs on a list of hardware products, and to provide references for each. It came back with a table summarising pin outs for each of the eight products, and a URL reference for each.

Of the 8, 3 were wrong, and the references contained no information about pin outs whatsoever.

That kind of hallucination is, to me, entirely different than what a human researcher would ever do. They would say “for these three I couldn’t find pinouts” or perhaps misread a document and mix up pinouts from one model for another.. they wouldn’t make up pinouts and reference a document that had no such information in it.

Of course humans also imagine things, misremember etc, but what the LLMs are doing is something entirely different, is it not?

[fspeech]

Humans are also not rewarded for making pronouncements all the time. Experts actually have a reputation to maintain and are likely more reluctant to give opionions that they are not reasonably sure of. LLMs trained on typical written narratives found in books, articles etc can be forgiven to think that they should have an opionion on any and everything. Point being that while you may be able to tune it to behave some other way you may find the new behavior less helpful.

[JAlexoid]

Newer models can run a search and summarize the pages. They're becoming just a faster way of doing research, but they're still not as good as humans.