Asklemmy

If it generally answers correctly, have you tried asking it those questions?

My personal experience is that it’s generally accurate unless you ask it very specific questions about very specialized stuff. Of course, this is the sort of stuff that you couldn’t ask a random guy in the street; they’d probably have no idea what you are on about.

Go ask it questions about specific register bits for a specific microcontroller and I’ve found that it will generally be wrong.

On an another note, I don’t know if it’s still the case but there were people at one point saying that if you’d ask if it is better to walk or drive to the car wash 500 meters away from your house to go get your car washed, it would nearly systematically answer that it would be better to walk. Of course, this sort of prompt is fishing for a wrong answer, but it does show how “stupid” LLMs can be (and of course, we can be similarly stupid when asked questions that attempt to misdirect you).

It should be reminded that the problem regarding LLM accuracy is not only whether it’s more likely to get an answer correct than an average human being, but also the fact that people tend to view them as quite authoritative - after all, even if we know they can output incorrect facts, we also know that they’ve been trained in a more or less the whole of human knowledge. In comparison, we’re a lot more more critical of human sources - you’re not going to trust some random dude so much if you ask him a programming problem as he is unlikely to have any clue of what you are talking about.

In other words, it’s sort pointless to compare your LLM’s accuracy to a random dude on random questions because you wouldn’t go around asking a random dude for his input for most of these questions (or at least not without keeping in mind that said dude probably doesn’t know better than you). Instead you’d look for someone who knows his shit and ask him.

Not to mention that LLMs tend to be a lot more confidently incorrect which is more likely to give people the wrong idea.

Also, 90% percent accuracy might seem excellent, but it does mean that if you ask it 10 questions every day you will learn something wrong every day on average. If google ai search gets it wrong 5% of the time, it will present wrong information to users hundreds of thousands times a day. (all numbers out of my ass)

Also, accuracy errors can quickly start compounding when we’re talking agents. If the agent breaks down your prompt in 10 tasks and has a 10% chance to do each task wrong, it becomes highly probable that the agent will fail to do correctly what you have asked it to do.

Also, if your starting point is that humans often get things wrong, don’t forget that LLMs are trained on first and foremost on human output.

Which brings me to my last point. LLM’s can’t really be more accurate than their training data. If an LLM is generally correct about something it means that the people that have written or said whatever about it have been generally correct.