Whatever it is, it won't be sold as an AI product. Coding and writing tools are probably the easiest to predict. An AI hiding in IntelliSense popping up and warning you that your lacking the proper exception handling, that you're leaking memory and offers to add the missing code, is already doable. Just don't label it as AI, it's realtime security screening for your code.
Or writing an article in Word or Google Docs, having a built in fact-checker akin to the spell/grammar checker is clearly useful. Pink squiggly line, your facts are incorrect, click to fix. Hell built that thing into Facebook or X. Again, it's not completely out of the question to add that right now and have it add the correct sources.
LLMs are clearly useful, but they aren't really a product, they are an engine you can put into other things.
Would be lovely, but many issues. 1. If LLMs can't reliably produce factual information today, how can they check if any statement is factual? 2. What about writing that is not recounting facts? e.g. fiction or marketing? 3. who decides what is factual? Does the system give a pass to statements like "full self-driving" or "AGI" or anything accompanied by "the likes of which have never been seen before"?
This is the sharpest objection in the thread, and I think it dissolves if you redefine "verification" as provenance rather than truth-arbitration. The problem with "the model checks its own facts" is real. But the useful version doesn't ask the model to be a judge — it asks the system to record, per claim: which tool call produced it, what query was run, what source was cited, when. Then a human (or a second, dumber check) can re-run the chain. You don't need the AI to know what's true; you need every claim to be re-derivable on demand.
In practice this is what separates automations I trust from ones I don't. The ones I trust emit an audit trail as a side effect — every output links back to its inputs. The ones I don't just hand me polished text. The checkbox UI the author proposes is one surface for this; the deeper point is that verification-by-construction scales where human re-checking doesn't.
mrweasel · · focus · HN ↗
Or writing an article in Word or Google Docs, having a built in fact-checker akin to the spell/grammar checker is clearly useful. Pink squiggly line, your facts are incorrect, click to fix. Hell built that thing into Facebook or X. Again, it's not completely out of the question to add that right now and have it add the correct sources.
LLMs are clearly useful, but they aren't really a product, they are an engine you can put into other things.
AvAn12 · · focus · HN ↗
solooperator1 · · focus · HN ↗
In practice this is what separates automations I trust from ones I don't. The ones I trust emit an audit trail as a side effect — every output links back to its inputs. The ones I don't just hand me polished text. The checkbox UI the author proposes is one surface for this; the deeper point is that verification-by-construction scales where human re-checking doesn't.