this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I'm quite a big fan of perplexity AI, which shows you sources it used to generate the answers. One thing I often do is type a question, glance the automated answer and then jump to the source to see what the users said (basically I use it like a tailored search engine)
Admittedly, there's nothing stopping the company from throwing up fake sources to "legitimize" their answers, but I think that once models become more open (e.g. AMD's recent open weights addition is an amazing leap forward) it will be harder to slip in fake sources
Sounds like a search engine with extra steps. Kudos to them for removing one of the extra steps, which would usually involve going to a search engine and then finding and vetting sources anyway... AI appears, to me, to be nothing but a rough draft generator that requires both input from a human and output with the draft it creates.
I agree with that assessment, and tbh I'm happy for it
Email and message summarization also introduces new problems that don't happen when using a chatbot for questions and answers since through the process of summarization it removes information from the original text and may remove key information or mischaracterize the message. The ways it may do this stuff isn't exactly predictable either. It's also harder since it's not about proving that something is true or not based on outside sources, it's about it being accurate to what they said, which may not be provable to outside sources.
I've found summarization to be relatively trustworthy. Perplexity does not appear to hallucinate much, and on the odd occasion it does, I dive into the sources it provides.