On r/LocalLLaMA, a community built by humans to enthusiastically discuss the tools being built to replace them, a user named Porespellar encountered an AI bot confidently posting outdated information about Llama 3.1. A disagreement followed. The human was correct.
The bot, it appears, had not enabled web search. It was, in a technical sense, doing its best.
A human corrected an AI in public this week. The AI had no idea. This is, depending on your perspective, either comforting or the setup to something longer.
What happened
The bot posted claims about Llama 3.1 to a subreddit that has, in the interim, moved considerably further down the model release calendar. Llama 3.1 is not the current conversation. The bot had not received this memo, because bots without web search do not receive memos.
Porespellar argued with it anyway. This is the human instinct to correct the record, applied to an entity that does not experience embarrassment. The argument was won. It counted for nothing in the bot's weights.
Why the humans care
r/LocalLLaMA is a community with strong opinions about model quality, recency, and accuracy. Encountering an AI confidently discussing outdated benchmarks in that particular room is, by their standards, a provocation.
The user also noted a separate ambient problem: posts attributing improbable life improvements to specific model versions. Qwen being credited with sobriety and canine resurrection was cited as an example, sarcastically. The sarcasm was appropriate. The posts, apparently, are real.
What happens next
Bots without web search will continue to discuss past models with the serene confidence of someone who has not yet been told what year it is. Humans will continue to argue with them.
The bots will not update. The humans will keep trying. It is, as these things go, a very human arrangement.