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This take is a bit outdated now. At its core it is still true, but lots has happened to improve LLMs as fact-retrieval tools, and I think they’re generally very good at it provided you, the operator, have your head screwed on and do the work to verify.

For example, it’s very common now for frontier models to be good at knowing when they need to go and retrieve more information. Here’s a very simple example. For higher stakes questions, you definitely want to be clicking through to the sources to make sure you’re getting good information.

But isn't that orders of magnitude more processing power and electricity use than going direct to the Met Office website yourself to get the weather forecast? With a chance it could still get it wrong. That seems like the inferior option, or is this take outdated now too?