2 posts tagged with "grounding"

The insidious thing about LLM confabulation in technical domains isn't that the model produces obviously wrong answers. It's that the model produces beautifully structured, confidently stated, technically plausible answers that are subtly wrong in ways that only domain experts catch — and often only after the damage is done.

A Monte Carlo physics simulation that initializes correctly but resamples particle positions from scratch at each step rather than making incremental updates. A chemical formula that follows the right naming conventions but has an incorrect oxidation state. An engineering specification that cites the right standard, references the right units, and has exactly the wrong load coefficient. Each output looks right. Each sounds authoritative. Each is wrong in ways that won't surface until someone runs the experiment, stress-tests the component, or critically reads the derivation.

Most engineers discover the limits of live web grounding the same way: they wire up a search API in an afternoon, ship it to production, and spend the next three weeks explaining why the latency is six seconds, the answers are wrong about recent events, and users are occasionally getting directed to fake phone numbers.

The underlying assumption — that search-augmented LLMs are just "regular RAG but with fresh data" — is the source of most of the pain. Live web grounding shares almost nothing with static retrieval beyond the word "retrieval." It is a distributed systems problem wearing an NLP hat.