Let's take a look. Galactica can generate wikipedia articles, supposedly.

So let's see what they look like. Here's one for Brandolini's law, the principle that bullshit takes another of magnitude less effort create than to clean up.

Left: Galactica's attempt at creating a wikipedia entry
https://galactica.org/?prompt=wiki+article+on+brandolini%27s+law

Right: The actual wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Here's the kicker. It's not that Galactica picked the wrong law. It is that the Padua economist to whom Galactica attributes the law, Gianni Brandolini, DOES NOT EXIST.

Galactica's phrasing of the law itself? That does not exist either. No one has ever said that phrase online (rather a surprise, tbh).

Galactica doesn't let us "access and manipulate what we know about the universe." It generates *pure bullshit* — which, incidentally, will be orders of magnitude more difficult to clean up.

UW researcher Robert Wolfe pointed out to me that there is a fundamental category mistake in how #galactica is being pitched.

This is not a machine learning system that is designed to represent scientific facts, models, and the structures that associate them. (There are other research efforts that attempt to do that.) This is a large language model that is designed to produce semantically plausible text using scientific terms and conforming to our expectations for various technical formats.

That’s more or less exactly what a large language model like this does.

It is trained to produce text it seems like it was written by a competent person. In this case #galactica also uses a technical vocabulary, frequent citation, structured argumentation, numbers, etc. to create a veneer of legitimacy—all tools frequently employed in the sort of new-school bullshit that we treat in our book.

it doesn’t care about facts. It has no representation of them beyond their semantic relations.