Comment by tempfile

16 hours ago

BS machine produces BS; in other news water is wet and sky is blue.

What's surprising about this is that you can get the bullshit machine to produce correct externally validate citations. It's not particularly hard either—it's one of the first things you build when you give an LLM access to a body of documents/search. So for a large public service to whiff like this is certainly a stain on their credibility.

  • On the other hands it's a boost to their credibility that they make their mistakes easier to evaluate than their competition does. It would be worse if they had a similar error rate without openly providing references. Kudos to Perplexity for including more empirical attack surface.

  • > you can get the bullshit machine to produce correct externally validate citations

    How?

    • By training it on a whole bunch of examples with valid external citations, to the point where it's able to hallucinate something that's valid. Of course, it won't always work, which is the point of TFA.