You can potentially solve this problem outside of the network, even if you can’t solve it within the network. I consider accuracy to be outside the scope of LLMs, and that’s fine since accuracy is not part of language in the first place. (You may have noticed that humans lie with language rather often, too.)

Most of what we’ve seen so far are bare-bones implementations of LLMs. ChatGPT doesn’t integrate with any kind of knowledge database at all (only what it has internalized from its training set, which is almost accidental). Bing will feed in a couple web search results, but a few minutes of playing with it is enough to prove how minimal that integration is. Bard is no better.

The real potential of LLMs is not as a complete product; it is as a foundational part of more advanced programs, akin to regular expressions or SQL queries. Many LLM projects explicitly state that they are “foundational”.

All the effort is spent training the network because that’s what’s new and sexy. Very little effort has been spent on the ho-hum task of building useful tools with those networks. The out-of-network parts of Bing and Bard could’ve been slapped together by anyone with a little shell scripting experience. They are primitive. The only impressive part is the LLM.

The words feel strange coming off my keyboard, but…Microsoft has the right idea with the AI integrations they’re rolling into Office.

The potential for LLMs is so much greater than what is currently available for use, even if they can’t solve any of the existing problems in the networks themselves. You could build an automated fact-checker using LLMs, but the LLM itself is not a fact-checker. It’s coming, no doubt about it.