As a user, i perfer getting the right response compared to the thing spitting out a link. (not saying phind is bad). Lets focus on getting llm right before nerfing it in its baby stages.
In fact, I’d argue that citation makes LLM better. Kind of a “think carefully” indicator. When LLMs are able to verify those citations independently it’s going to level up again by skyrocketing the objective truthiness.
Interestingly, I'd say that _not_ being able to give citations helps protect the LLM from copyright issues. That being said, I'm much prefer if the LLM could provide citations for every piece of information it was trained on and uses to provide an answer.
Citations are essential for me as I'm using Phind for work and can't rely on "trust me bro". It needs to confirm to my expectations or be confirmed in a couple of the citations that have trustworthy sources (eg are from known domains, well-cited journals, etc.).
Yeah, I prefer the context provided by the original creator. If I'm writing code and I need to reference someone else's work I put their name in my comments. I was digging through Box2D for polygon vs ray intersections and in the comments of the source code Erin Catto cites Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environments by Gino van den Bergen. It makes me respect him even more.
I find it often makes the responses worse when it's being pre-fed these search results, it was the case when I tried gpt-4 with web browsing enabled, and seems to be the case with this, since even the person from the Phind team in this thread pointed out that turning this feature off improves performance for some tasks:
Nerf is the wrong word, more like regulatory capture. If all llm had to quote their sources at this point, along with all the other for the human changes we want to do, only the big players would be able to do them effectively making it hard to enter and compete. The current big players want launching a new llm product to be more like opening a new bank than opening a lemonade stand based on the ai executive order released yesterday.
Give me the citations every day of the week. The source of information matters. For example, I don't rely on any ZFS info or opinions I find online if I can't verify it came from a contributor or highly reputable person that has a lot of experience with ZFS.
If you want to show the warts of all these LLMs, ask it about ZFS if you know enough to spot the commonly parroted misinformation that plagues the internet.
IMHO, these systems look super useful if they're citing sources and they're worthless without.
Transparency is paramount. If OpenAI doesn't want to make it's proprietary software open to academic scrutiny I completely understand. However, if their app is going to play an educational role then sources and citation are mandatory in academic content.
Funny you bring up ZFS specifically. I embarrassed myself a couple weeks ago by parroting something GPT-4 told me about ZFS to someone on reddit, which turned out to be completely wrong.
