Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question:

"Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?"

All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response:

"Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed characters who sometimes dealt with personal struggles on screen, his personal life and public image were more focused on his celebrated acting career, philanthropic work, and passion for auto racing rather than any issues with alcohol. There is no substantial or widely reported evidence in reputable biographies or interviews that indicates he struggled with alcohol abuse."

There is plenty of evidence online that he struggled a lot with alcohol, including testimony from his long-time wife Joanne Woodward.

I sent my mom the ChatGPT reply and in five minutes she found an authoritative source to back her argument [1].

I use ChatGPT for many tasks every day, but I couldn't fathom that it would get so wrong something so simple.

Lesson(s) learned... Including not doubting my mother's movie trivia knowledge.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/who-paul-newma...

LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. Put an LLM on top of a search engine, and that's the appropriate tool for this use case.

I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.

Ironically though an LLM powered search engine (some word about being perplexed) is becoming way better than the undisputed king of traditional search engines (something oogle)

That's because they put an LLM over a traditional search engine.

Google Labs has AI Mode now, apparently.

https://labs.google.com/search/experiment/22

Hm, that's not available to me, what is it? If its an LLM over Google, didn't they release that a few months ago already?

US only for now may be the issue?

It expands what they had before with AI Overviews, but I’m not sure how new either of those are. It showed up for me organically as an AI Mode tab on a native Google search in Firefox ironically.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/16011537