Right... knowledge is one of the things (the one thing?) that LLMs are really horrible at, and that goes double for models small enough to run on normal-ish consumer hardware.

Shouldn't we prefer to have LLMs just search and summarize more reliable sources?

Even large hosted models fail at that task regularly. It's a silly anecdotal example, but I asked the Gemini assistant on my Pixel whether [something] had seen a new release to match the release of [upstream thing].

It correctly chose to search, and pulled in the release page itself as well as a community page on reddit, and cited both to give me the incorrect answer that a release had been pushed 3 hours ago. Later on when I got around to it, I discovered that no release existed, no mention of a release existed on either cited source, and a new release wasn't made for several more days.

Yup which is why these models are so exciting!

They are specifically training on webbrowsing and python calling.

Reliable sources that are becoming polluted by output from knowledge-poor LLMs, or overwhelmed and taken offline by constant requests from LLMs doing web scraping …

Why do I need "AI" when I can just (theoretically, in good old times Google) Google it?

Because now the model can do it for you and you can focus on other more sophisticated tasks.

I am aware that there’s a huge group of people who justify their salary by being able google.