I’m aware of the flaws. I don’t agree that means it shouldn’t exist. There’s certainly room for improvement, and I’m even open to the idea that it’s too early to roll it out.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology on your part. Large language models do not understand anything. They have no concept of truth or falsehood. They are not intelligent. The only thing they do is predict text. They’re more complex and realistic versions of the classic ELIZA program, not real AI. They will never be capable of filling the role Mozilla has shoehorned them into.
I’m not sure I understand the argument that this is somehow making them money.
The behavior of the Mozilla representatives strongly implies it. I have no idea how they intend to make money with this, and they may or may not succeed, but people don’t generally act like this unless they think they can strike it rich by doing so (and don’t care about the harm they’ll cause in the process).
They will never be capable of filling the role Mozilla has shoehorned them into.
You’re probably right that generative AI on its own, even if improved, can never fundamentally solve the truth problem. A probability engine is exactly just that, merely testing the probability of an output given the dataset. But for such a specific use-case as this, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility to build some sort of reverse-lookup system that sanity checks the output before sending it. It’ll probably never be suitable for extremely advanced applications, though. But I’m just not thoroughly convinced that this is entirely useless and needs be abandoned just yet.
The behavior of the Mozilla representatives strongly implies it. I have no idea how they intend to make money with this, and they may or may not succeed, but people don’t generally act like this unless they think they can strike it rich by doing so (and don’t care about the harm they’ll cause in the process).
I don’t like to assume ill intent just to fill in an unexplained gap. It’s entirely possible for someone to just be wrong. Just like I might be wrong, and this is in fact a technological dead end.