Ask it details about a little-documented event and it'll happily tell you plausible, but utterly false, lies, however.

Apparently the "early 2011 Bougainville earthquake" was magnitude 6.3, at a depth of 21.7km, on the 20th January and caused "widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure in the region, and triggered landslides that blocked roads and hampered rescue efforts".

It was actually on the 7th Feb, a 6.4 and at a depth of 415km. There were "no immediate reports of damage or injuries".

None of this is remotely surprising, considering it's a turbocharged statistical model and it probably ingested a few words about it at most, out of billions and billions, but somewhere along the line from "famous" to "footnote" subjects, it will segue into complete fiction.

Thanks for the link! I don't think that really addresses my concern, though.

My point is that these LLMs are basically incredibly large programs that defy analysis with our current tools. Sure, I can poke it a few times and see that it usually does what I want, but that's not the same as saying it never goes off the rails.

If it does something crazy like post my bank login online, even only once in a billion times, that's still orders of magnitude higher than I'm willing to accept.