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.
I don't think this is an answer. I'm basically claiming there is an uncontrollable error probability, and I think you agree with that. The person I'm replying to implies it can always be reduced (maybe even to zero).
Ah, yes, I see. The distinction between a working clock and one that's right twice a day.
I assume by forcing them to validate their citations with a deterministic tool.
What deterministic tool will validate that a citation faithfully represents the cited claim?