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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Ask a human to provide accurate citations for any random thing they know and they won't be able to do a good job either. They'd probably have to search to find it, even if they know they got it from a document originally and have some clear memory of what it said.

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But they could, if they needed to. But most people don’t need to, so they don’t keep that information in their brains.

I can’t tell you the date of every time I clip my toenails, but if I had to could remember it.

LLMs can remember their sources. It's just additional knowledge, there's nothing special about it.

When you ask an LLM to tell you the height of Mount Everest, it clearly has a map of mountains to heights, in some format. Using exactly the same mapping structure, it can remember a source document for the height.

No, it “knows” that one of the tokens that commonly follows is “29,031 ft”.

The fact that a human chooses not to do remember their citations, does not mean they lack the ability.

This argument comes up many times “people don’t do this” - but that is a question of frequency, not whether or not people are capable.

LLMs are capable as well if you give them access to the internet though

Humans did research and remembered sources before the Internet was a thing.

But also, can you give an example where an LLM with access to the Internet can find a primary source?

I don't think learning to refer to sources is something inherently impossible for LLMs, but it is very different to the kind of implicit knowledge they seem to excel at.

They just paste in the first link then or some other programmed heuristic, they aren't like a human that puts in effort to find something relevant. An LLM with internet access isn't smarter than just asking google search.

Yes, humans wont lie to you about it, they will research and come up with sources. Current LLM doesn't do that when asked for sources (unless they invoke a tool), they come back to you with hallucinated links that looks like links it was trained on.

Unfortunately it's not an uncommon experience when reading academic papers in some fields to find citations that, when checked, don't actually support the cited claim or sometimes don't even contain it. The papers will exist but beyond that they might as well be "hallucinations".

Humans can speak bullshit when they don't want to put in the effort, these LLMs always do it. That is the difference. We need to create the part that humans do when they do the deliberate work to properly create those sources etc, that kind of thinking isn't captured in the text so LLMs doesn't learn it.

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