Yeah. The fact that I can't ask ChatGPT for a source makes the tool way less useful. It will straight up say "I verified all of these links" too.

As you identified, not paying for it is a big part of the issue.

Running these things is expensive, and they're just not serving the same experience to non-paying users.

One could argue this is a bad idea on their part, letting people get a bad taste of an inferior product. And I wouldn't disagree, but I don't know what a sustainable alternative approach is.

Surely the cost of sending a few HTTP requests and seeing if they 404 is negligible compared to AI inference.

I would have no issue if the free version of ChatGPT told me straight up “You gotta pay for links and sources”. It doesn’t do that.

100% agree with that, as I alluded to in my last sentence. And that honestly seems like it might be a good product strategy in the short term.

> The 404 links are truly bizarre. Nearly every link to github.com seems to be 404. That seems like something that should be trivial for a tool to verify. reply

Same issue with Gemini. Intuitively I'd also assume it's trivial to fix but perhaps there's more going on than we think. Perhaps validating every part of a response is a big overhead both financially and might even throw off the model and make it less accurate in other ways.