To the extent that the frequent reports on HN and elsewhere of unreliable GPT output are motivated by a desire to warn people not to believe all the output now, I agree with those warnings. Some of those reports seem to imply, however, that we will never be able to trust LLM output. Seeing how quickly the tools are advancing, I am very doubtful about that.

Ever since ChatGPT was released at the end of November, many people have tried to use it as a search engine for finding facts and have been disappointed when it failed. Its real strengths, I think, come from the ability to interact with it—ask questions, request feedback, challenge mistakes. That process of trial and error can be enormously useful for many purposes already, and it will become even more powerful as it becomes automated.