Flutterby™! : LLMs still bullshitting

Work has been building up some demos, one of them involved some visualizations of timeline-esque data, and yesterday I got pointed at an outline of notable events from a recent startup, and built a little HTML tool to visualize it. I needed some "what if we had supporting data for this", so I did a bunch of searching around to find articles supporting what ChatGPT had given as the outline of the company, coerced that stuff into JSON, and dropped it into my little visualization.

So far so good.

The eventual notion is that this visualization inside our tool will have value with some strategic partnerships, but I thought "what about just plugging in an LLM back-end?". So I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro:

I am looking for a timeline of notable events in the history of the Intel Corporation. Examples are major product releases, new CEOs or changes in board, large funding rounds, other events which suggest a change in corporate direction. Use your search engine. Format your output as an array of JSON objects with the date of the event as "date", the "title" of the event, a "category" (one of "Funding", "Media", "Product", "Team"), a short "description", and then a short array list of "links" to articles describing or elaborating on this event, as "url", "title" of the publication or source, and a summary as "description".

Provided a few more details and some example JSON. Got back an answer that's... not too bad. The dates I've spot-checked are close (the days of the month are not correct, and sometimes zero, the months and years seem plausible). The events it listed could be thought of as notable.

Of the few I've checked, the links it's provided as supporting evidence are either 404, or to articles that are not, in fact, supporting evidence.