L.L.M.s have a disturbing propensity to just make things up out of nowhere. (The technical term for this, among deep-learning experts, is ‘‘hallucinating.’’)

One of the most well-documented shortcomings of large language models is that they can hallucinate. Because these models have no direct knowledge of the physical world, they're prone to conjuring up facts out of thin air. They often completely invent details about a subject, even when provided a great deal of context.

The application is powered by LaMDA, one of the latest generation of large language models. At its core, LaMDA is a simple machine — it's trained to predict the most likely next word given a textual prompt. But because the model is so large and has been trained on a massive amount of text, it's able to learn higher-level concepts.