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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

If it was easy to simply verify truth "with any external system" then would we even need a language model?

E.g. if you could just ask [THING] for the true answer, or verify an answer trivially with it... just ask it directly!

I ran into this issue with some software documentation just this morning - the answer was helpful but completely wrong in some intermediate steps - but short of a plugin that literally controlled or cloned a similar dev environment to mine that it would take over, it wouldn't be able to tell that the intermediate result was different than it claimed.

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If one api knows one set of facts, and another api knows another, ad infinitum, are you going to tell people they should remember which api knows which set of facts and query each individually? Why not have a single service that knows of all the various apis for different things, and can query and synthesize answers that extract the relevant information from all of them (with compare/contrast/etc)?

When you develop a plugin, you provide a description that ChatGPT uses to know when to call that particular service. So you don't need to tell people what they need to use - the model will decide independently based on the plugins you enabled.

That being said - we developed a custom plugin for Qdrant docs, so our users will be able to ask questions about how to do certain things with our database. But I do not believe it should be enabled by default for everybody. A non-technical person doesn't need that many details. The same is for the other services - if you prefer using KAYAK over Expedia, you're free to choose.

From the videos I thought it was the plugins the user enabled? That's what your second paragraph sounds like too, but your first seems to suggest it being more automatic, user-doesn't-need-to-worry-about-it?

Yeah, you need to enable the plugins you want. I'm just saying you can enable all the ones that make sense for you, and you don't have to switch between them.

ChatGPT is already pretty good at "admitting" it's wrong when it's given the actual facts, so it does seem likely that providing it with a way to e.g. look up trusted sources and ask it to take those sources into consideration might improve things.

I think that helps with "hallucination" but less so with "factuality" (when re-reading the parent discussions, I see the convo swerved a bit between those two, so I think that'll be an increasingly important distinction in the future).

Confirming it's output against a (potentially wrong) source helps the former but not the latter.

All it needs is guardrails which is available already.

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