Both fable and sol are confidently wrong all the time in their most cherished domain - software engineering - I can’t quote anything because they’re working on my employer’s code bases. They’re much less wrong than their predecessors and they’re also quite good at point out their mistakes, but they’re still wrong a lot.

they are wrong on the specific nuance of my codebase too, i am talking about learning something - i can still learn everything about software engineering talking to a bot.

Here you go https://claude.ai/share/c8407777-1ccf-402b-9010-7bc57228b943

I asked Opus 4.8 to critique my algebra notes (these are definitely not masters level- just undergrad second year). It hallucinated an error it claimed I made in the notes and then put in a correction I didn't need because what I had written was correct.

What I said in my notes was:

   Notice that a cyclic group is a degenerate (in the sense of "smallest
   non-trivial") case of a finitely generated group where the generating set is
   a singleton.

It left-off the "non-trivial" and said that what I said was this was the smallest case of a finitely-generated group which is incorrect because it excludes the trivial group.

The point is I see the LLMs as a "smart friend"/colleague I can work with but I do think critically about what I get told and don't just take it as face value because it's not always correct for sure even in relatively basic cases like this.

One area that LLMs tend to do badly in still is sailing. I sail casually and I have friends who are instructors, basically all the LLMs we tried gave really unsafe advice for a particular manoeuvre. Claude was the notable exception getting it mostly right, but even so I wouldn't rely on it there.

This is blatantly false based on my usage of Fable and Opus. Though they are much better than they used to be.

This deduction is baseless, there is no reason to think an LLM will only hallucinate on complex topics. They still get the "number of es in seventeen" question wrong regularly. The kind of mistakes an LLM makes has no clear resemblance to the kind of mistakes a human makes, because they are not doing the same thing.

Specific quirk of llms, also pretty much solved by existing thinking models.

I think you guys are misunderstanding me, you can still talk to a llm to learn everything about physics or maths.

The problem is that you have no idea of what you're being taught is actually correct.

And for the harder maths you want something not just to explain the answer but to diagnose your conceptual error behind your questions. Asking the teacher after class or tutorial type systems work efficiently for a reason.