Right, but ChatGPT doesn't always automatically use search. I don't know what mechanisms it uses to decide whether to turn that on (maybe free accounts vs paid makes a difference?) but I rarely see it automatically turn on search, it usually tries to respond directly from weights.
And on the flip side, my local Llama 3 8b does a pretty good job at avoiding hallucinations when it's hooked up to search (through Open WebUI). Search vs no-search seems to me to matter far more than model class.
I'm just specific in my prompting, rather than letting it decide whether or not to search.
These models aren't (yet, at least) clever enough to understand what they do or don't know, so if you're not directly telling them when you want them to go and find specific info rather than guess at it you're just asking a mystic with a magic ball.
It doesn't add much to the length of prompts, just a matter of getting in the habit of wording things the right way. For the request I gave as my example a couple of comments above, I wrote "Please search for every one of the Guardian articles whose titles I pasted above and give me a list of URLs for them all." whereas if you write "Please tell me the URLs of these Guardian articles" then it may well act as if it knows them already and return bullshit.