[signatoremo]

> I can ask Gemini five times at what temperature I should take a waterfowl out of the oven, and get five different answers, 10°C apart.

Are you sure? Both Gemini and ChatGPT gave me consistent answers 3 times in a row, even if the two versions are slightly different.

Their answers are inline with this version:

https://blog.thermoworks.com/duck_roast/

[jorvi]

What do you mean, "are you sure"? I literally saw and see it happen in front of my eyes. Just now tested it with slight variations of "ideal temperature waterfowl cooking", "best temperature waterfowl roasting", etc. and all these questions yield different answers, with temperatures ranging from 47c-57c (ignoring the 74c food safety ones).

That's my entire point. Even adding an "is" or "the" can get you way different advice. No human would give you different info when you ask "what's the waterfowl's best cooking temperature" vs "what is waterfowl's best roasting temperature".

[cruffle_duffle]

Did you point that out to one of them… like “hey bro, I’ve asked y’all this question in multiple threads and get wildly different answers. Why?”

And the answer is probably because there is no such thing as an ideal temperature for waterfowl because the answer is “it depends” and you didn’t give it enough context to better answer your question.

Context is everything. Give it poor prompts, you’ll get poor answers. LLMs are no different than programming a computer or anything else in this domain.

And learning how to give good context is a skill. One we all need to learn.

[jorvi]

But that isn't how normal people interact with search engines. Which is the whole argument everyone is saying here, how LLMs are now better 'correct answer generators' than search engine. They're not. My mother directly experienced that. Her food would have come out much better if she completely ignored Gemini and checked a site.

One of the best things LLMs could do (and that no one seems to be doing) is allow it to admit uncertainty. If the average weight of all tokens in a response drops below X, it should just say "I don't know, you should check a different source."

At any rate, if my mother has to figure out some 10 sentence stunted multiform question for the LLM to finally get a good consistent answer, or can just type "best Indian restaurant in Brooklyn" (maybe even with site:restaurant reviews.com"), which experience is superior?

> LLMs are no different than programming a computer or anything else in this domain.

Just feel like reiterating against this: virtually no one programs their search queries or query engineers a 10 sentence search query.

[jhhh]

If I made a new, not-AI tool called 'correct answer provider' which provided definitive, incorrect answers to things you'd call it bad software. But because it is AI we're going to blame the user for not second guessing the answers or holding it wrong ie. bad prompting.