Comment by furyofantares
15 days ago
It's not too strong. If it answered from its weights, it's pretty meaningless. If it did a web search and found reports of other people saying this, you'd want to know that this is how it answered - and then you'd probably just say that here on HN rather than appealing to claude as an authority on claude.
They also said it "admitted" this as a major problem, as if it has been compelled to tell an uncomfortable truth.
GP here, this is indeed exactly whT I was getting at, thanks for wording it for me; you put it better than I would've.
In this specific case I'd go one step further and say that even if it did a web search, it's still almost certainly useless because of the low quality of the results and their outdatedness, two things LLMs are bad at discerning. From weights it doesn't know how quickly this kind of thing becomes outdated, and out of the box it doesn't know how to account for reliability.
Maybe I'm just being too literal, but I don't know if you're really disagreeing with me. I was disputing "the response they give to this kind of question is completely meaningless". An answer from its weights is out of date, but only completely meaningless if this is a completely new issue with nothing relevant in the training data. And, as you say, the answer could be search-based and up to date.