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I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs. I use GPT, Grok, Gemini, Mistral etc every day in the hope they'll save me time searching for information and summarizing it. They continue to fabricate links, references, and quotes, like they did from day one. I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist. Happens all the time. Yes, it has gotten somewhat better in the past 2 years in that with DeepSearch and chains of thought about 50-60% or so of the references exist. By my personal estimate currently GPT 4o DeepResearch is the best one. Grok in particular often doesn't include references even if asked. It can't seem to link even to tweets. It's hugely frustrating. Yes, I have tried Gemini, and actually it was even worse in that it frequently refuses to even search for a source and instead gives me instructions for how to do it myself. Stopped using it for that reason. I also use them for quick estimates for orders of magnitude and they get them wrong all the time. One thing they do save me time with is unit conversion and collecting all kinds of constants. You'd think though that this shouldn't take a 100 million++ LLM to get done. Yesterday I uploaded a paper to GPT to ask it to write a summary and it told me the paper is from 2023, when the header of the PDF clearly says it's from 2025. I don't even know what the heck is going on there, but intelligence ain't it. I sense that a lot of people now think knowledge graphs will fix the LLM-issue, but no, they will not. They cannot. Even in the case that knowledge graphs would prevent logical inconsistency 100%, there are a lot of text-constructions that are perfectly logically consistent but have zero relation to reality. Companies will keep pumping up LLMs until the day a newcomer puts forward a different type of AI model that will swiftly outperform them. On that day, it will become apparent that a lot of companies have been hugely overvalued. It will be a very bad day for the stock market.

Sabine Hossenfelder
German Physicist. Author of "Lost in Math" & "Existential Physics". Creator of "Science with Sabine". rt's/shares/likes are not endorsements
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