I used the Ai2 Playground and Olmo 3 32GB Think, and asked it to recommend a language for a green-field web app based on a list of criteria. It gave me a very good and well-reasoned answer (Go, with Rust as a backup), formatted like a high-quality ChatGPT or Claude response.

I then had it show the "OlmoTrace" for its response, which seems like it finds exact matches for text strings in its training data that end up in the response. Some of the matched sources were related (pages about Go, Rust, Python, etc), while others were completely unrelated, but just happened to have the same turn of phrase (e.g. "Steeper learning curve").

It was interesting, but is it useful? It was impossible for me to actually fact-check any of the claims in the response based on the matched training data. At this stage, it felt about as helpful as linking every word to that word's entry in a dictionary. "Yep, that's a word alright." I don't think it's really tracing the "thought."

What could be interesting is if the user could dynamically exclude certain training sources before the response is generated. Like, I want to ask a question about climate change, but I want to exclude all newspapers and focus on academic journals.

Transparency is a good first step, but I think we're missing the "Step 2."