Glossary term
Glossary term
Agentic Systems
Within the ML world, a property describing a model whose output is based on reality. Factuality is a concept rather than a metric. For example, suppose you send the following prompt to a large language model:
What is the chemical formula for table salt?
A model optimizing factuality would respond:
NaCl
It is tempting to assume that all models should be based on factuality. However, some prompts, such as the following, should cause a generative AI model to optimize creativity rather than factuality.
Tell me a limerick about an astronaut and a caterpillar.
It is unlikely that the resulting limerick would be based on reality.
Contrast with groundedness.
Created for this library
A legal-tech vendor measures factuality on its contract summaries against the source document before releasing each model version.
A medical writing assistant scores factuality of generated patient summaries against the underlying chart to flag any hallucinated detail.
A financial research assistant evaluates factuality of generated company summaries against 10-K filings before allowing the model to assist analysts.
Definition source: Google for Developers Machine Learning Glossary | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License