Comment by Taylor_OD
> ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors.
I mean... They also can read actual documentation. If I'm working on any api work or a language I'm not familiar with, I ask the LLM to include the source they got their answer from and use official documentation when possible.
That lowers the hallucination rate significantly and also lets me ensure said function or code actually does what the llm reports it does.
In theory, all stackoverflow answers are just regurgitated documentation, no?
> I mean... They also can read actual documentation.
This 100%. I use o3 as my primary search engine now. It is brilliant at finding relevant sources, summarising what is relevant from them, and then also providing the links to those sources so I can go read them myself. The release of o3 was a turning point for me where it felt like these models could finally go and fetch information for themselves. 4o with web search always felt inadequate, but o3 does a very good job.
> In theory, all stackoverflow answers are just regurgitated documentation, no?
This is unfair to StackOverflow. There is a lot of debugging and problem solving that has happened on that platform of undocumented bugs or behaviour.