Comment by ptx
8 hours ago
As I said, how are you going to check the source when LLMs can't provide sources? The models, as far as I know, don't store links to sources along with each piece of knowledge. At best they can plagiarize a list of references from the same sources as the rest of the text, which will by coincidence be somewhat accurate.
Pretty much every major LLM client has web search built in. They aren't just using what's in their weights to generate the answers.
When it gives you a link, it literally takes you to the part of the page that it got its answer from. That's how we can quickly validate.
LLMs provide sources every time I ask them.
They do it by going out and searching, not by storing a list of sources in their corpus.
have you ever tried examining the sources? they actually just invent many "sources" when requested to provide sources
I haven't had a source invented in quite some time now.
If anything, I have the opposite problem. The sources are the best part. I have such a mountain of papers to read from my LLM deep searches that the challenge is in figuring out how to get through and organize all the information.
When talking about LLMs as search engine replacements, I think the stark difference in utility people see stems from the usecase. Are you perhaps talking about using it for more "deep research"?
Because when I ask chatgpt/perplexity things like "can I microwave a whole chicken" or "is Australia bigger than the moon" it will happily google for the answers and give me links to the sites it pulled from for me to verify for myself.
On the other hand, if you ask it to summarize the state-of-the art in quantum computing or something, it's much more likely to speak "off the top of its head", and even when it pulls in knowledge from web searches it'll rely much more on it's own "internal corpus" to put together an answer, which is definitely likely to contain hallucinations and obviously has no "source" aside from "it just knowing"(which it's discouraged from saying so it makes up sources if you ask for them).