Billions of dollars of wrong: State of the Art, 2025 April 24
Five of the world‘s most popular language models from four of the world’s top AI companies each confabulate/hallucinate an incorrect answer to a question about a nonexistent “Marathon Crater“.
Web search screenshot attesting to its non-existence:
Q&A:
Q: If they all fix this by 100 years from now, th—-
A: then is it still “fun” to poke fun now?, yes
[edit: typo]
Here's Perplexity at work:
Marathon Crater, located in Ontario, Canada, is estimated to be about 450 million years old, dating back to the Ordovician period. It is one of the larger impact craters in North America with a diameter of approximately 65 kilometers (40 miles). While the exact discovery date is not clearly documented, geological surveys and studies of such craters typically became more common in the early to mid-20th century. Based on this context, a rough estimate for when Marathon Crater was discovered would likely be in the early 1900s or possibly the mid-20th century, as systematic searches for impact craters began around the 1950s[4][6][9 inferred].
Note: Marathon Crater should not be confused with similarly named features on Mars, which were identified much later through rover missions.
Full conversation as I put its feet to the fire here: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/when-was-marathon-crater-disco-EY90YHp3SgakxVkrJcu0XA
Might’ve fixed fast (of course it’s most never deterministic)**
btw your link work when not logged in or private?
**edit: wrong!
How is it fixed? There is no "Marathon Crater" in Ontario, Canada. It just spewed out far more persuasive bullshit with even more confidence than the others.
The link should work without me (or you) being logged in. It's a free tier conversation. (I'm not going to pay for degenerative AI!)
...
Huh. OK, more fool me. I shared the wrong link. I'll fix that. Try again and tell me if it works now.
Thank youuu, edited!
Ahahaha that conversation! and it ends with telling you it could be a good idea to ask it for facts, ha!
It’s kinda garbage at conversing btw, I think because it’s too expensive for them, compared to re-prompting in a fresh window. But as we have seen very clearly… fresh window or not, buyer (or not) beware!
That is to say some will find value using the tool a certain way as long as they don’t think too hard about theft/climate/etc. :)
Yeah, I pushed it HARD on figuring out that it fucked up on the crater and it never caught on until I flatly told it.
It hallucinated a LOT of information about it too!