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No it's not. The scenario that you, Freepingcreature, and others insisted would never happen and/or be trivially easy to avoid, has now happened.
What this tells me is that my model of GPT's behavior was more much more accurate than yours.
It’s trivial to attach LLMs to a database of known information (eg. Wikipedia combined with case law data, government data, Google books’ library, whatever) and have them ‘verify’ factual claims. The lawyers in this case could have asked ChatGPT if it made up what it just said and there’s a 99% chance it would have replied “I’m sorry, it appears I can find no evidence of those cases” even without access to that data. GPT-4 already hallucinates less. As Dase said, it is literally just a matter of attaching retrieval and search capability to the model to mimic our own discrete memory pool, which LLMs by themselves do not possess.
People latching onto this with the notion that it “proves” LLMs aren’t that smart are like an artisan weaver pointing to a fault with an early version of the Spinning Jenny or whatever and claiming that it proves the technology is garbage and will never work. We already know how to solve these errors.
Saw on twitter that the lawyer did ask ChatGPT if it was made up and it said it was real
None of those prompts ask explicitly if the previous output was fictional, which is what generally triggers a higher-quality evaluation.
If these sorts of issues really are as trivially easy to fix as you claim, why haven't they been fixed?
One the core points of my post on the Minsky Paradox was that a lot of the issues that those who are "bullish" on GPT have been dismissing as easy to fix and/or irrelevant really aren't, and I feel like we are currently watching that claim be borne out.
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