alt Hacker NewsIt’s really not like that. If I ask you to tell me about a geographical place I just made up, you can trivially and generally instantly recognize you don’t recognize it. A child can do this. You wouldn’t be able to hold a job or generally get through life without this level of self awareness.
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So can LLMs. I asked one about South Wollopop and it suggested that it'd never heard of it but maybe I meant South Wollo in Ethiopia. And that's just a local model with modest hardware and no internet access. First attempt.
I mean, if our position is that a hyper advanced statistical model is going to ultimately struggle with the concept of something being unlikely to be true then the statisticians may as well give up in despair. There is no theoretical obstacle here.
Current frontier models are pretty good at telling you when they don't know something, or if you're asking about something nonexistent or nonsensical. Not always, but there has been massive improvement on this front lately.
If your last experience with frontier LLMs (read: not models that Google and ChatGPT are giving away for free, but models you have to pay for) was over a year ago, you may not realize that.