Five error modes of frontier models used raw at the API level

gerardsans · x · 2026-09-21

gerardsans lays out five failure modes of frontier models used raw at the API: coverage gaps in the corpus producing silent interpolation and fluent hallucination; invisible negative space with no "no support" signal; context drift over long windows as errors accumulate; no causal or eval layer since prompts and guardrails are just more tokens; and data-only grounding that makes external verification mandatory. His takeaway: AI literacy should teach these error modes first, inference mechanics later.

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