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.
