this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Ypu have no idea what youre talking about. They absolutely have access to "information"
No, they really don't. That's not how they work. At least, not if the "information" you're talking about is real semantic content that real minds can process.
Every piece of information you think an LLM has access to is actually just converted into a stream of additional tokens that are fed into the model to (hopefully usefully) modify the next tokens it predicts. That's not the same thing as having actual access to information. Tokens are just numbers with statistically more (or less) likely relationships to each other.
I'm not trying to downplay LLMs. They're architecturally interesting and have genuine uses. I'm just trying to head off a bit of technical inaccuracy.
Absolutely correct and well said. Until you give it a tool to call a websearch (in my case SearxNG), I occasionally break it out (local 27B model) when a search is pulling lots of AI slop, Spy vs Spy style. I make it give me references and it usually indicates a bad search (XY problem)
LLMs don't. There are tools that can fetch new information and then gets fed into the model as more tokens, but that's just a special case of what kescusay is saying about injecting text.