Re:Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
by simonw on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @04:14PM
(#42569361)
LLMs on their own are effectively useless for references or citations. They need to be plugged into other systems for that - search-enabled ones like https://gemini.google.com or ChatGPT with search enabled or Perplexity can do this, although at that point they are mostly running the exact same searches you would.
Your first task is definitely not what I would call a "menial" task.
Your second task is not a "task", but a knowledge search. LLMs are not good with searches (unless augmented - like RAG).
The problem is: for the tasks that I can give the LLM (or human) that I can easily verify and correct, the LLM fails with the majority of them, for example
- programming tasks in my area of expertise (which is more "mathematical" than what is usual in SV startups) where I know how a high-level solution has to look like, and where I can ask the LLM to explain the gory details to me. Yes, these gory details are subtle (which is why the task can be menial), but the code has to be right. I can verify this, and the code is not correct.
- getting literature references about more obscure scientific (in particular mathematical) topics. I can easily check whether these literature references (or summaries of these references) are hallucinations - they typically are.