A lossy encyclopedia which you can talk to and it can look up facts in the lossless version while having a conversation OTOH is... not a bad idea at all, and hundreds of millions of people agree if traffic numbers are to be believed.

(but it isn't and won't ever be an oracle and apparently that's a challenge for human psychology.)

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simonw 3 days ago | parent [-]

Completely agree with you - LLMs with access to search tools that know how to use them (o3, GPT-5, Claude 4 are particularly good at this) mostly paper over the problems caused by a lossy set of knowledge in the model weights themselves.

But... end users need to understand this in order to use it effectively. They need to know if the LLM system they are talking to has access to a credible search engine and is good at distinguishing reliable sources from junk.

That's advanced knowledge at the moment!

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johnecheck 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

From earlier today:

Me: How do I change the language settings on YouTube?

Claude: Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the language button on the footer.

Me: YouTube pages scroll infinitely.

Claude: Sorry! Just click on the footer without scrolling, or navigate to a page where you can scroll to the bottom like a video.

(Videos pages also scroll indefinitely through comments)

Me: There is no footer, you're just making shit up

Claude: [finally uses a search engine to find the right answer]

	▲	pbhjpbhj 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		IME, eventually, after a long time, the scrolling stops and you can get to the footer. YMMV!

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gf000 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Slightly off topic, but my experience is that they are pretty terrible at using search tools..

They can often reason themselves into some very stupid direction, burning all the tokens for no reason and failing to reply in the end.