Stanford professor: LLMs are great brainstorm partners but confidently spew plausible nonsense

anshulkundaje · x · 2026-09-26

Stanford professor Anshul Kundaje weighs in on using LLMs for research brainstorming: they're genuinely useful as cross-domain brainstorm partners, but far from reliable — models confidently produce legitimate-sounding nonsense that doesn't match their actual accuracy.

A commenter adds that having a partner who can even pretend to follow you across many fields is a great boon, with a known rigor penalty at the end — which applies to human experts too. The thread also suggests this gap may be a natural safeguard against misuse: non-experts struggle to avoid rabbit holes, while the models only become useful partners if you invest enough hours and bring real domain knowledge.

Related event: Stanford Professor Finds Frontier Models Fake Understanding in Open-Ended Domains(8 posts)→

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