Thanks for pointing out the elephant in the room with LLMs.
The basic design is non-deterministic. Trying to extract "facts" or "truth" or "accuracy" is an exercise in futility.
Thanks for pointing out the elephant in the room with LLMs.
The basic design is non-deterministic. Trying to extract "facts" or "truth" or "accuracy" is an exercise in futility.
You can't blame an LLM for getting the facts wrong, or hallucinating, when by design they don't even attempt to store facts in the first place. All they store are language statistics, boiling down to "with preceding context X, most statistically likely next words are A, B or C". The LLM wasn't designed to know or care that outputting "B" would represent a lie or hallucination, just that it's a statistically plausible potential next word.
Of course, once an LLM is asked to create a bespoke software project for some complex system, this predictability goes away, the trajectory of the tokens succumbs to the intrinsic chaos of code over multi-block length scales, and the result feels more arbitrary and unsatisfying.
I also think this is why the biggest evangelists for LLMs are programmers, while creative writers and journalists are much more dismissive. With human language, the length scale over which tokens can be predicted is much shorter. Even the "laws" of grammar can be twisted or ignored entirely. A writer picks a metaphor because of their individual reading/life experience, not because its the most probable or popular metaphor. This is why LLM writing is so tedious, anodyne, sycophantic, and boring. It sounds like marketing copy because the attention model and RL-HF encourage it.