[bensyverson]

I was designing a system that pulls structured data out of an unstructured transcript, and Opus initially suggested a confidence score for each value. When I asked it “do you think the model will generate a meaningful number there?” the answer was basically “ha, you caught me.”

What did work was asking the model to emit citations in the form of line numbers from the transcript. It dramatically dropped hallucination.

[abound]

> I asked it “do you think the model will generate a meaningful number there?”

This also isn't likely to give you good results, models don't have a good sense of their own capabilities.

This is also in the same camp of asking a model why it did something. It'll generate something plausible and likely totally incorrect.

[bensyverson]

> models don't have a good sense of their own capabilities.

It actually had some memorized knowledge about LLMs being bad at confidence intervals, then it did a cursory web search. But it didn't need to do any of that; I already knew they would be bad numbers.