> out of 100 random questions I might think to ask, it’s likely to say something wrong or stupid a handful of times at least.
What are some examples?
What are some examples?
Does it about once a day, that I notice.
My prompt is akin to "recommend <item type> with <niche criteria>". The first 3-ish results are about right, and then 7 of the next 10 are hallucinations and the LLM clearly can't throw up its hands and say "I got nothing".
I'm sure this is a hard problem because of a) how many items there are, b) how much overlap there is between product names, descriptions, manufacturers, different versions of the same product, etc, so keeping them distinct in the model's memory is probably hard, and even worse if it is dynamically fetching and summarizing content then it will be very easy to conflate different items, and c) LLMs are known for not working well on the edge cases with few examples.
I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I re-asked it the same problem to create the paste, and it did about as well the second time). It was unable to solve the problem, and it’s a small, old model, so…fair enough…but also its answer was pretty incoherent, with stuff like “Since A is an invariant set, it's always possible to find a cave that the fox cannot be in. Therefore, you can always catch the fox in that cave.” (…catch it…in the cave it can’t be in?).
Then, off the top of my head: Claude somewhat recently generated a Spark Job where the worker timeout was longer than the worker heartbeat, so workers would always inevitably be killed when they didn’t heartbeat within their timeout window. (also…neither option needed to be set?) Before I noticed the problem, I asked Claude why the job was taking so long, and it told me the data set was too large. More recently, there was a blog post by John Scalzi I was having a hard time finding, so I posed the problem to ChatGPT, and it came back with a blog post that didn’t include any version of the text I remembered and wasn’t really topically relevant (and maybe I hallucinated the blog post, but it could’ve said “I can’t find it” instead of “here you go”). On another occasion, I was trying to find a particular episode of Bob the Builder for my kids, so I Googled it, and Gemini kept giving me the wrong season and episode number, even after several rounds of “no, s5e6 is ‘that thing’, I’m looking for ‘this thing’.” Turned out the episode wasn’t on Amazon at all (which I had to tell it), and I had to go find it on YouTube.
That said, as I sit here scrolling through my history to see if I’ve forgotten any particularly good examples, I have to admit they do a better job than I’m giving them credit for. But I still wouldn’t have them write my email for me (the one time I tried that, when I was playing with openclaw, it sent a fairly demanding email to someone I didn’t know that well without asking for confirmation, and I had to go apologize and explain that I hadn’t really written the email, which was embarrassing), nor am I particularly excited to have chatjimmy as a permanent resident of my pocket.