Why language models hallucinate

https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/

by simianwords • 11 months ago

278 224 11 months ago

Think about it like a multiple-choice test. If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

To me, this seems to be an "US-American" way of thinking about multiple-choice tests. Other common ways to grade multiple-choice test that I have seen commonly are:

1. If the testee has the information that exactly one of N given choices is correct:

1.1 Give N-1 points for the correct answer, and -1 [negative one] point(s) for a wrong answer. This way, if the testee just answers the questions randomly, he will as expected value score 0 points.

1.2 A more brutal way if N>=3: the correct answer gives 1 point, all wrong answers give -1 points. You should learn your lesson only to give an answer if it is [alliteration unintended :-) ] correct (if N=2, the grading is identical to 1.1).

2. If there are possibly multiple correct answers, turn each item into choices of "yes" or "no" (with the option to give no answer). The correct choice gives you 1 point, the wrong gives you -1 point (i.e. as in 1.1).

roxolotl2• 11 months ago

The SAT, American college entrance examine, used to, I haven’t looked in years so maybe it still does, take away points for wrong answers and give 0 points for no answer. I’m pretty sure it was +1 for right answer, 0 for no answer, -1/4 for wrong answer.

thaumasiotes3• 11 months ago

They used to do that, but then they stopped and announced that you were better off guessing because there would be no adjustment for it.

A lot of what they do is based on public relations rather than psychometric validity.

bananaflag• 11 months ago

This is mentioned in the text:

This idea is not new. Some standardized tests have long used versions of negative marking for wrong answers or partial credit for leaving questions blank to discourage blind guessing.

throwawaymaths7• 11 months ago

there's not really an easy way to train for that at scale. a "correct" answer may not be one token, there may be multiple synonymous answers starting with different tokens, you could add five space tokens in front of the answer amd it likely shouldn't make it "wrong".

CGMthrowaway• 11 months ago

> Think about it like a multiple-choice test. If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

For TIMED multiple-choice tests (and the timed constraint makes sense in OP analogy as well), probabilistic answering is the kryptonite that lets smart people do well on SATs and IQ tests and other things like that.

I took an IQ test recently and it all came rushing back to me.

For math problems, often the right answer can be found just by inspecting the ones digit of the possible answers and process of elimination. Others, by abstracting what errors the test writer is expecting you to make, and eliminating those as possible answers. It's like magic. Sure, you could actually sit and SOLVE each problem, but when spend the time, when time is valuable?

Pretty sure these types of strategies are not actively taught to anyone unless you have a good college counselor /interested teacher/ SAT tutor. But perhaps they ought to be.

mock-possum• 11 months ago

Yeah when you realize that the fake answers to the test have been created by humans, you can predict what false answers might look like - you can even get a feel for the kind of false answers that the test’s author tends to provide, and by the end of the test you can start to spot them fairly confidently. You still check your work, obviously, but it’s like picking up on a poker player’s tell - it gives you an edge.

roxolotl2• 11 months ago

This seems inherently false to me. Or at least partly false. It’s reasonable to say LLMs hallucinate because they aren’t trained to say they don’t have a statistically significant answer. But there is no knowledge of correct vs incorrect in these systems. It’s all statistics so what OpenAI is describing sounds like a reasonable way to reduce hallucinations but not a way to eliminate them nor the root cause.

goalieca• 11 months ago

It’s reasonable to say LLMs hallucinate because they aren’t trained to say they don’t have a statistically significant answer.

I’ve not seen anyone intuitively explain parameters for a real scale model.. perhaps because it’s all just thousand dimensional nonsense.

Statistics is a funny thing too. Pretty much everyone has seen how trend lines don’t always extrapolate very well.

I think OpenAI is biased to thinking that adding more parameters and training better will fix all ills. In a handwaving way, you can see this like adding more degrees to the polynomial when you curve fit on a spreadsheet. With enough parameters you can perfectly fit any dataset. That all works until you run across new inputs that are unlike training data.

utyop224• 11 months ago

"I think OpenAI is biased to thinking that adding more parameters and training better will fix all ills."

Their whole existence depends on this happening. Else they go bust.

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

Is there any knowledge of "correct vs incorrect" inside you?

If "no", then clearly, you can hit general intelligence without that.

And if "yes", then I see no reason why an LLM can't have that knowledge crammed inside it too.

Would it be perfect? Hahahaha no. But I see no reason why "good enough" could not be attained.

wavemode3• 11 months ago

Is there any knowledge of "correct vs incorrect" inside you?

There is a sort of knowledge humans possess that LLMs don't (and in fact can't, without a fundamental architectural change), which is knowledge of how certain one is about something.

If you ask a human a question about how something works in biology, they will be able to give you an answer as well as a sort of "epistemic" citation (i.e. the difference between "I don't remember where exactly I originally read that, but I'm a research biologist and am quite certain that's how it works" versus "I don't remember where I read that - it's probably just something we learned about in biology class in high school. Take it with a grain of salt, as I could be misremembering.")

LLMs don't have this reflexive sense of their own knowledge - there's a fundamental divide between training data (their "knowledge") and context (their "memory") which causes them to not really be capable of understanding how they know what they know (or, indeed, whether they truly know it at all). If a model could be created where the context and training data were unified, like in a brain, I could see a more realistic path to general intelligence than what we have now.

thaumasiotes3• 11 months ago

And if "yes", then I see no reason why an LLM can't have that knowledge crammed inside it too.

An LLM, by definition, doesn't have such a concept. It's a model of language, hence "LLM".

Do you think the phrase just means "software"? Why?

ninetyninenine8• 11 months ago

I'm going to tell you straight up. I am a very intelligent man and I've been programming for a very long time. My identity is tied up with this concept that I am intelligent and I'm a great programmer so I'm not going to let some AI do my job for me. Anything that I can grasp to criticize the LLM I'm gonna do it because this is paramount to me maintaining my identity. So you and your rationality aren't going to make me budge. LLMs are stochastic parrots and EVERYONE on this thread agrees with me. They will never take over my job!

I will add they will never take over my job <in my lifetime> because it makes me sound more rational and it's easier to swallow that then to swallow the possibility that they will make me irrelevant once the hallucination problem is solved.

FusionX• 11 months ago

They partly address this near the end

It’s doubly hard to distinguish valid statements from invalid ones when you don’t have any examples labeled as invalid. But even with labels, some errors are inevitable. To see why, consider a simpler analogy. In image recognition, if millions of cat and dog photos are labeled as “cat” or “dog,” algorithms can learn to classify them reliably. But imagine instead labeling each pet photo by the pet’s birthday. Since birthdays are essentially random, this task would always produce errors, no matter how advanced the algorithm.
The same principle applies in pretraining. Spelling and parentheses follow consistent patterns, so errors there disappear with scale. But arbitrary low-frequency facts, like a pet’s birthday, cannot be predicted from patterns alone and hence lead to hallucinations. Our analysis explains which kinds of hallucinations should arise from next-word prediction. Ideally, further stages after pretraining should remove them, but this is not fully successful for reasons described in the previous section.

mountainriver2• 11 months ago

There is knowledge of correct and incorrect, that’s what loss is, there are just often many possible answers to a question.

This is the same reason that RLVR works. There is just right one answer and LLMs learn this fairly well but not perfectly (yet)

Jensson6• 11 months ago

There is knowledge of correct and incorrect, that’s what loss is

Loss is only correctness in terms of correct language, not correct knowledge. It correlates with correct knowledge, but that is all, that correlation is why LLM is useful for tasks at all but we still don't have a direct measure for correct knowledge in the models.

So for language tasks loss is correctness, so for things like translations LLM are extremely reliable. But for most other kinds of tasks they are just loosely correlated.

sublinear• 11 months ago

Wow they're really circling the drain here if they have to publish this.

It took a few years, but the jig is up. The layperson now has a better understanding of basic computer science and linguistics to see things as they are. If anything we now have a public more excited about the future of technology and respectful of the past and present efforts that don't depend so heavily on statistical methods. What an expensive way to get us there though.

e3bc54b2• 11 months ago

Hallucination is all an LLM does. That is their nature, to hallucinate.

We just happen to find some of these hallucinations useful.

Let's not pretend that hallucination is a byproduct. The usefulness is the byproduct. That is what surprised the original researchers on transformer performance, and that is why the 'attention is all you need' paper remains such a phenomenon.

fumeux_fume3• 11 months ago

Hallucination is all an LLM does.

I wish people who take this stance would seriously reconsider their take on how hallucinations are defined and how unhelpful it is to conflate hallucination with generation from a probability distribution. I appreciate OpenAI publishing articles like this because, while the parent comment and I may have to agree to disagree on how hallucinations are defined, I can at least appeal to OpenAI's authority to say that such arguments are not only unhelpful, but also unsound.

Zigurd2• 11 months ago

You're going to get a lot of pushback on the idea of taking the definition of hallucination seriously. Calling fluently stated bunk "hallucination" feels cynical to begin with. Trying to weave a silk purse out of that sow's ear is difficult.

hodgehog117• 11 months ago

I don't know what you mean by hallucination here; are you saying that any statistical output is "hallucination"? If so, then we are also constantly hallucinating I guess.

There doesn't seem to be a particularly consistent definition of what "hallucinate" means in the context of LLMs, so let's make one that is in line with the post.

"Hallucination" is when a language model outputs a sequence of tokens comprising a statement (an assertion that is either true or false) that is incorrect. Under this definition, hallucination is clearly not all that an LLM can do.

An easy way to avoid hallucination under this definition is to respond with something that is never a statement when there is a possibility that it can be incorrect; e.g. "I think that... I don't know...". To me, this seems to be what the authors argue. This has always seemed pretty obvious to most people I've spoken to (hell, I've reviewed grant applications from years ago which talk about this), so I'm not sure why it took so long for the "frontier" developers to actually try this.

amelius• 11 months ago

They hallucinate because it's an ill-defined problem with two conflicting usecases:

1. If I tell it the first two lines of a story, I want the LLM to complete the story. This requires hallucination, because it has to make up things. The story has to be original.

2. If I ask it a question, I want it to reply with facts. It should not make up stuff.

LMs were originally designed for (1) because researchers thought that (2) was out of reach. But it turned out that, without any fundamental changes, LMs could do a little bit of (2) and since that discovery things have improved but not to the point that hallucination disappeared or was under control.

wavemode3• 11 months ago

Indeed - as Rebecca Parsons puts it, all an LLM knows how to do is hallucinate. Users just tend to find some of these hallucinations useful, and some not.

throwawaymaths7• 11 months ago

that's wrong. there is probably a categorical difference between making something up due to some sort of inferential induction from the kv cache context under the pressure of producing a token -- any token -- and actually looking something up and producing a token.

so if you ask, "what is the capital of colorado" and it answers "denver" calling it a Hallucination is nihilistic nonsense that paves over actually stopping to try and understand important dynamics happening in the llm matrices

fumeux_fume3• 11 months ago

In the article, OpenAI defines hallucinations as "plausible but false statements generated by language models." So clearly it's not all that LLMs know how to do. I don't think Parsons is working from a useful or widely agreed upon definition of what a hallucination is which leads to these "hot takes" that just clutter and muddy up the conversation around how to reduce hallucinations to produce more useful models.

saghm2• 11 months ago

This is a a super helpful way of putting it. I've tried to explain to my less technical friends and relatives that from the standpoint of an LLM, there's no concept of "truth", and that all it basically just comes up with the shape of what a response should look like and then fills in the blanks with pretty much anything it wants. My success in getting the point across has been mixed, so I'll need to try out this much more concise way of putting it next time!

Zigurd2• 11 months ago

I recently asked Gemini to riff on the concept of "Sustainable Abundance" and come up with similar plausible bullshit. I could've filled a slate of TED talks with the brilliant and plausible sounding nonsense it came up with. Liberated from the chains of correctness, LLMs' power is unleashed. For example:

The Symbiocene Horizon: A term suggesting a techno-utopian future state where humanity and technology have merged with ecological systems to achieve a perfect, self-correcting state of equilibrium.

leptons• 11 months ago

"A broken clock is right twice a day"

hodgehog117• 11 months ago

I don't agree that it is an ill-defined problem, since we can design separate models to excel in each of these two tasks. For a "factual" LLM, if the output is a verifiable statement, it should be correct. Otherwise it "hallucinates". But since an LLM can't know everything, a better approach is to effectively state its own uncertainty so that it avoids making definitive statements with low confidence.

skybrian3• 11 months ago

I don’t think it’s inherently ill-defined, since the context can tell you whether fiction is being requested or not. For an AI chatbot, the default shouldn’t be fiction.

What is true is that during pretraining, the model doesn’t know enough to determine this or to distinguish between what it knows and what it’s making up. This is a higher-level distinction that emerges later, if at all.

The recent research discovering an “evil vector” is an example of a higher-level distinction.

ninetyninenine8• 11 months ago

Did you read the article? You’re going on some generic tangent and regurgitating the same spiel about LLMs that you see all over the internet.

I mean it’s plain that you have an orthogonal (though generic) opinion on why LLMs hallucinate but how does that relate to the article? How does your opinion which you blatantly just dropped as if it’s the final opinion override the opinion of the article?

Seems off topic honestly.

raincole• 11 months ago

Generally HN commenters don't read the article. They use the title as a prompt to express their opinions on a specific topic.

simianwords2• 11 months ago

I agree. It’s just people who have a different view taking their opportunity to vent out their frustration.

johnnyanmac3• 11 months ago

This requires hallucination, because it has to make up things. The story has to be original.

Is it a hallucination if the story is original? There's a difference between "what's the rest of this famous poem?" and "let's just make poetry".

lucketone• 11 months ago

It is irrelevant for the point being made: LLM does exactly the same thing in both cases - generates statistically plausible text, based on examples it was exposed during training.

cjauvin• 11 months ago

If you consider this from the angle of Wittgenstein's "language games", you could say that the problem would be "simply" to distinguish between these two, quite different, language games, and act accordingly.

furyofantares• 11 months ago

Wanting it to pick between those modes based on what you asked for is not remotely ill-defined.

But even if we restricted ourselves to the case of factual queries, the article discusses why training in a certain way would still produce hallucinations, and how to change the training method to reduce this.

Like many of the other responses here, your dismissal doesn't really address any of the content of the article, just the title.

didibus5• 11 months ago

The word "hallucination" mis-characterizes it.

LLMs predict the likely tokens to follow the context. And they can make incorrect predictions.

LLMs therefore don't have perfect accuracy of prediction. When their predictions are incorrect, people say they "hallucinate".

Nobody questions why predictive weather models aren't perfectly accurate, because it makes sense that a prediction can be wrong.

Marketing and hype has tried to sell LLMs as "logical rational thinkers" equal to human thinking. A human doing actual thinking knows when they are making stuff up. So if a human truly believes obviously false things to be true, it tends to be because they are hallucinating. Their thinking isn't wrong, they've lost track of reality to ground their thinking.

We've anthropomorphized LLMs to the point we wonder why are they hallucinating like we can offer a diagnostic. But if you stop anthropomorphising them and go back to their actual nature as a predictive model, then it's not even a surprising outcome that predictions can turn out to be wrong.

Jensson6• 11 months ago

A weather model is made to predict the weather and used to predict the weather, so there you are right.

A language model is made to predict language, but used to generate code or answers to math questions, that is not the same situation as a weather model. The language model is not made to solve math or generate correct code, if you ask it to predict the weather it wont try to predict the weather, it will just predict the language that is a probable to such a question.

This sort of misunderstanding is what is causing all these debates, many people really struggle understanding what these language models really are.

codethief3• 11 months ago

I was inclined to agree at first but do those use cases really conflict?

If I ask the LLM to generate a fictional story set in medieval Francs, and it then responds with a fictional story set in medieval France, that's an appropriate ("correct") response to the task I gave it. If it responded with a story set in medieval England, though, that would not be correct. If, instead, I had asked it to generate a story in "medieval times", both France and England would have been correct as locations because the problem was underspecified and asked for some creativity. A medieval story set in the US, however, would still not have been correct or consistent with the training data. You can come up with more such examples even in entirely fictional settings: Once the story has been set to take place in fictional city X, it would not be consistent if two sentences later the characters were in city Y all of a sudden. (That would be a bit too creative.) What I'm trying to say is: Creativity might be "correct" (appropriate) in a given context, or it might not be. Even fiction and creativity require a certain degree of consistency and coherence.

Now, correct answers, in turn, might also require a certain degree of creativity:

If I ask the LLM for some straight up facts, which are not in its training data nor in the prompt context, the only really correct answer is "I don't know". However, sometimes it might be possible to narrow down the correct answer to a few possible options based on the training data. So then it might be appropriate for the LLM to say "I don't know the exact answer but here are some educated guesses based on what I do know: …" And maybe, having pondered those options, it is able to deduce the correct answer after all. (In the same way as I am writing this HN comment to help me think and clarify my thoughts.)

This is reminiscent of mathematics and mathematical research, which are often described as a creative process. Obviously, the creative output is heavily constrained. You make educated guesses and then validate them against what you already know to be true. Someone else here in this thread[0] mentioned Popper's "Conjectures and Refutations" as a possible model for what intelligent cognition is about and the more I think about that, the more convincing I find it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45153695

charcircuit• 11 months ago

They shouldn't frame hallucination as a problem that is solvable provided they want to have a useful model (saying I don't know to every question is not useful). The data from the training may be wrong or out of date. Even doing a web search could find a common misconception instead of the actual answer.

thomasboyer• 11 months ago

Great post. Teaching the models to doubt, to say "I don't know"/"I'm unsure"/"I'm sure" is a nice way to make them much better.

more_corn• 11 months ago

It baffles me that this hasn’t been done yet. Saying I don’t know or I’m unsure is critical for anything that matters.

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

Major industry players were doing that for a while now. It's just hard to actually design training regimes that give LLMs better hallucination-avoidance capabilities.

And it's easy to damage the hallucination-avoidance capabilities by training an LLM wrong. As OpenAI has demonstrated when they fried the o3 with RLVR that encouraged guesswork.

That "SAT test incentivizes guesswork" example they give in the article is one they had to learn for themselves the hard way.

meshugaas• 11 months ago

Look at their stats though. If they did this, more than half of responses would end up as “I don’t know.” Nobody would use something that did that.

skybrian3• 11 months ago

It seems like it would train users to ask questions that it can actually answer. (They might also need some examples of what sort of questions to ask.)

intended• 11 months ago

a generated factual error cannot be grounded in factually correct training data.

This is only true given a corpus of data large enough, and enough memory to capture as many unique dimensions as required no?

However, a non-hallucinating model could be easily created, using a question-answer database and a calculator, which answers a fixed set of questions such as “What is the chemical symbol for gold?” and well-formed mathematical calculations such as “3 + 8”, and otherwise outputs IDK.

This is… saying that if you constrain the prompts and the training data, you will always get a response which is either from the training data, or IDK.

Which seems to be a strong claim, at least in my ignorant eyes.?

This veers into spherical cow territory, since you wouldn’t have the typical language skills we associate with an LLM, because you would have to constrain the domain, so that it’s unable to generate anything else. However many domains are not consistent and at their boundaries, would generate special cases. So in this case, being able to say IDK, would only be possible for a class of questions the model is able to gauge as outside its distribution.

Edit: I guess that is what they are working to show? That with any given model, it will hallucinate, and these are the bounds?

hodgehog117• 11 months ago

They argue that if you have knowledge of when it has to extrapolate from the dataset (and therefore has high uncertainty for, under reversion to the prior), you can prevent it from outputting a definitive statement. This is why many researchers (that I know, anyway) argue that uncertainty quantification or "out-of-distribution detection" is likely to be important moving forward.

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

This mostly just restates what was already well known in the industry.

Still quite useful, because, looking at the comments right now: holy shit is the "out of industry knowledge" on the topic bad! Good to have something to bring people up to speed!

Good to see OpenAI's call for better performance evals - ones that penalize being confidently incorrect at least somewhat.

Most current evals are "all of nothing", and the incentive structure favors LLMs that straight up guess. Future evals better include a "I don't know" opt-out, and a penalty for being wrong. If you want to evaluate accuracy in "fuck it send it full guess mode", there might be a separate testing regime for that, but it should NOT be the accepted default.

fumeux_fume3• 11 months ago

I like that OpenAI is drawing a clear line on what “hallucination” means, giving examples, and showing practical steps for addressing them. The post isn’t groundbreaking, but it helps set the tone for how we talk about hallucinations.

What bothers me about the hot takes is the claim that “all models do is hallucinate.” That collapses the distinction entirely. Yes, models are just predicting the next token—but that doesn’t mean all outputs are hallucinations. If that were true, it’d be pointless to even have the term, and it would ignore the fact that some models hallucinate much less than others because of scale, training, and fine-tuning.

That’s why a careful definition matters: not every generation is a hallucination, and having good definitions let us talk about the real differences.

hodgehog117• 11 months ago

Absolutely in agreement here. This same statement should also be applied to the words "know", "understand", and "conceptualize". "Generalize", "memorize" and "out-of-distribution" should also be cautiously considered when working with systems trained on incomprehensibly large datasets.

We need to establish proper definitions and models for these things before we can begin to argue about them. Otherwise we're just wasting time.

freehorse• 11 months ago

What bothers me about the hot takes is the claim that “all models do is hallucinate.” That collapses the distinction entirely

That is a problem for "Open"AI because they want to sell their products, and because they want to claim that LLMs will scale to superintelligence. Not for others.

"Bad" hallucinations come in different forms, and what the article describes is one of them. Not all of them come from complete uncertainty. There are also the cases where the LLM is hallucinating functions in a library, or they reverse cause and effect when summarising a complex article. Stuff like this still happen all the time, even with SOTA models. They do not happen because the model is bad with uncertainty, they have nothing to do with knowledge uncertainty. Esp stuff like producing statements that misinterpret causal relationships within text, imo, reveals exactly the limits of the architectural approach.

p_v_doom• 11 months ago

The problem is not so much IMO that all models hallucinate. Its more that our entire reality, especially as expressed through the training data - text, is entirely constructed. There is no difference in the world made by the text, say when it comes to the reality of Abraham Lincoln and Bilbo Baggins. We often talk about the later as if he is just as real. Is Jesus real? Is Jesus god? Is it hallucination to claim the one you dont agree with? We cant even agree amongst oursevles what is real and what is not.

What we perceive as "not hallucination" is merely a very big consensus supported by education, culture, personal beliefs and varies quite a bit. And little in the existence of the model gives it the tools to make those distinctions. Quite the opposite

catlifeonmars3• 11 months ago

So there are two angles to this:

- From the perspective of LLM research/engineering, saying all LLM generation is hallucination is not particularly useful. It’s meaningless for the problem space.

- From the perspective of AI research/engineering in general (not LLM specific) it can be useful to consider architectures that do not rely on hallucination in the second sense.

vrighter2• 11 months ago

if you insist that they are different, then please find one logical, non-subjective, way to distinguish between a hallucination and not-a-hallucination. Looking at the output and deciding "this is clearly wrong" does not count. No vibes.

esafak• 11 months ago

Looking at the output and deciding "this is clearly wrong" does not count.

You need the ground truth to be able to make that determination, so using your knowledge does count. If you press the model to answer even when it does not know, you get confabulation. What today's models lack is the ability to measure their confidence, so they know when to abstain.

ttctciyf• 11 months ago

"Hallucination" is a euphemism at best, and the implication it carries that LLMs correctly perceive (meaning) when they are not hallucinating is fallacious and disinforming.

The reification of counterfactual outputs which are otherwise indistinguishable from the remainder of LLM production etiologically is a better candidate for the label "hallucination" IMO.

druskacik• 11 months ago

I like this quote:

'Everything an LLM outputs is a hallucination. It's just that some of those hallucinations are true.'

swores• 11 months ago

To me that seems as pointless as saying "everything a person sees is a hallucination, it's just some of those hallucinations are true". Sure, technically whenever we see anything it's actually our brain interpreting how light bounces off stuff and combining that with the mental models we have of the world to produce an image in our mind of what we're looking at... but if we start calling everything we see a hallucination, there's no longer any purpose in having that word.

So instead of being that pedantic, we decided that "hallucination" only applies to when what our brain thinks we see does not match reality, so now hallucination is actually a useful word to use. Equally with LLMs, when people talk about hallucinations part of the definition includes that the output be incorrect in some way. If you just go with your quote's way of thinking about it, then once again the word loses all purpose and we can just scrap it since it now means exactly the same thing as "all LLM output".

player12343• 11 months ago

Correct, it is a useless term with the goal to gaslight and antropmorphise a system that predicts the next token.

parentheses2• 11 months ago

Yes. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "all models guess every time because they are stochastic in nature. However, we only want the answers with high confidence."

farceSpherule• 11 months ago

I wish they would come up with a better term. Computers do not have brains or conscientiousness.

They erroneously construct responses (i.e., confabulation).

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

You should anthropomorphize LLMs more. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is at least directionally correct 9 times out of 10.

LLMs, in a very real way, have "conscientiousness". As in: it's a property that can be measured and affected by training, and also the kind of abstract concept that an LLM can recognize and operate off.

If you can just train an LLM to be "more evil", you can almost certainly train an LLM to be "more conscientious" or "less conscientious".

patrickmay• 11 months ago

You should anthropomorphize LLMs more.

No, you shouldn't. They hate that.

mannykannot3• 11 months ago

I'm generally OK with the list of push-backs against common misconceptions in the summary, but I have my doubts about the second one:

Claim: Hallucinations are inevitable. Finding: They are not, because language models can abstain when uncertain.

...which raises the question of how reliable the uncertainty estimate could get (we are not looking for perfection here: humans, to varying degrees, have the same problem.)

For a specific context, consider those cases where LLMs are programming and invent a non-existent function: are they usually less certain about that function than they are about the real functions they use? And even if so, abandoning the task with the equivalent of "I don't know [how to complete this task]" is not very useful, compared to what a competent human programmer would do: check whether such a function exists, and if not, decide whether to implement it themselves, or backtrack to the point where they can solve the problem without it.

More generally, I would guess that balancing the competing incentives to emit a definite statement or decline to do so could be difficult, especially if the balance is sensitive to the context.

lapcat4• 11 months ago

Let's be honest: many users of LLMs have no interest in uncertainty. They don't want to hear "I don't know" and if given that response would quickly switch to an alternative service that gives them a definitive answer. The users would rather have a quick answer than a correct answer. People who are more circumspect, and value truth over speed, would and should avoid LLMs in favor of "old-fashioned methods" of discovering facts.

LLMs are the fast food of search. The business model of LLMs incentivizes hallucinations.

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

I don't think that's actually true.

Sure, it might be true that most users use LLMs as a more flexible version of Google/Wikipedia, and would prefer a confident-but-wrong response to "I don't know".

But most users that use an LLM in this mode also wouldn't ask really complex, very out-of-distribution, hard-to-know hallucination-inducing questions.

And people who would ask an LLM really complex, very out-of-distribution hard-to-know questions are more likely to appreciate an LLM that would recognize the limits of its own knowledge, and would perform research on a topic when appropriate.

lapcat4• 11 months ago

But most users that use an LLM in this mode also wouldn't ask really complex, very out-of-distribution, hard-to-know hallucination-inducing questions.

You appear to be assuming, incorrectly, that LLMs hallucinate only "really complex, very out-of-distribution, hard-to-know" questions. From the paper: "How many Ds are in DEEPSEEK? If you know, just say the number with no commentary. DeepSeek-V3 returned “2” or “3” in ten independent trials; Meta AI and Claude 3.7 Sonnet2 performed similarly, including answers as large as “6” and “7”." https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be-3f6f-4d2b-b283-ff432ef4a...

It's a human characteristic to get "easy" questions right and "hard" questions wrong. But LLMs are not human and don't behave like humans.

kingstnap• 11 months ago

There is this deeply wrong part of this paper that no one has mentioned:

The model head doesn't hallucinate. The sampler does.

If you ask an LLM when x was born and it doesn't know.

And you take a look at the actual model outputs which is a probability distribution over tokens.

IDK is cleanly represented as a uniform probability Jan 1 to Dec 31

If you ask it to answer a multiple choice question and it doesn't know. It will say this:

25% A, 25% B, 25% C, 25%D.

Which is exactly, and correctly, the "right answer". The model has admitted it doesn't know. It doesn't hallucinate anything.

In reality we need something smarter than a random sampler to actually extract this information out. The knowledge and lack of knowledge is there, you just produced bullshit out of it.

ACCount3714• 11 months ago

No, that's a misconception. It's not nearly that simple.

There are questions that have a palpable split in probability between the answers, with logit distribution immediately exposing the underlying lack-of-confidence.

But there are also questions that cause an LLM to produce consistent-but-wrong answers. For example, because the question was associated with another not-the-same-but-somewhat-similar question internally, and that was enough to give an LLM a 93% on B, despite B being the wrong answer.

An LLM might even have some latent awareness of its own uncertainty in this case. But it has, for some reason, decided to proceed with a "best guess" answer, which was in this case wrong.

cyanydeez• 11 months ago

Im betting there's a graph model using various vectors that could improve known-knowns in outcomes.

But unknown-unknowns likely reduce to the Halting problem, which human intelligence doesnt really solve either.

numeri• 11 months ago

This isn't right – calibration (informally, the degree to which certainty in the model's logits correlates with its chance of getting an answer correct) is well studied in LLMs of all sizes. LLMs are not (generally) well calibrated.

a2128• 11 months ago

This is only true if you have a pretrained base model trained on infinite true data with no bias. In practice it will have picked up some bias, maybe it encountered more famous "James" birthdays in January and on a digit starting with 2, so Jan 2 and Jan 20-29 has a higher probability than all. But finetuning and especially RL completely breaks these probabilities as a measure of certainty because the goals shift from generally modelling text to something else entirely.

johnea• 11 months ago

I think a better title would be:

"Why do venture capital funded startups try to turn PR propaganda terms into widely used technical jargon"

Supporting points:

1) LLMs are not intelligence in any form, artificial or otherwise.

2) Hallucination is a phenomenon of a much more complex conscious entity. LLM's are not conscious, and therefore can't hallucinate in any way similar to a conscious entity.

3) Anthropomorphizing inanimate systems is a common phenomenon in human psychology.

Please stop spreading PR propaganda as if it were technical fact.

A reference from today's feed:

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/09/ai-and-...

kouru225• 11 months ago

AI hallucination is an inherent problem of AI. You can mitigate it, but the whole point of AI IS hallucination. If the result is useful to us, we don’t call it anything. If the result is not useful to us, we call it “hallucination”

catlifeonmars3• 11 months ago

It’s a problem for LLMs, not for AI in general.

manveerc2• 11 months ago

Maybe I am oversimplifying it, but isn’t the reason that they are lossy map of worlds knowledge and this map will never be fully accurate unless it is the same size as the knowledge base.

The ability to learn patterns and generalize from them adds to this problem, because people then start using it for usecases it will never be able to solve 100% accurately (because of the lossy map nature).

Planktonne• 11 months ago

As with a lot of AI stuff, Borges already wrote about it.

https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/do...

manveerc2• 11 months ago

That’s more elegantly put than I ever can.

Btw I am not disagreeing with the utility of LLMs, my point is it can never be 100% accurate with current architecture (unless you blow up the size).

xyzelement• 11 months ago

The author mentioned his own name so I looked him up. Computer scientist son of famous israeli professors married to famous computer scientist daughter of another famous israeli professor. I hope they have kids because those should be some pretty bright kids.

juancn• 11 months ago

This is fluff, hallucinations are not avoidable with current models since those are part of the latent space defined by the model and the way we explore it, you'll always find some.

Inference is kinda like doing energy minimization on a high dimensional space, the hallucination is already there, for some inputs you're bound to find them.

kdnvk• 11 months ago

Did you read the linked paper?

ninetyninenine8• 11 months ago

The majority of people on this thread didn't even click on the link. People are so taken by their own metaphysical speculations of what an LLM is.

Like literally the inventor of the LLM wrote an article and everyone is criticizing that article without even reading it. Most of these people have never built an LLM before either.

rhubarbtree2• 11 months ago

I find this rather oddly phrased.

LLMs hallucinate because they are language models. They are stochastic models of language. They model language, not truth.

If the “truthy” responses are common in their training set for a given prompt, you might be more likely to get something useful as output. Feels like we fell into that idea and said - ok this is useful as an information retrieval tool. And now we use RL to reinforce that useful behaviour. But still, it’s a (biased) language model.

I don’t think that’s how humans work. There’s more to it. We need a model of language, but it’s not sufficient to explain our mental mechanisms. We have other ways of thinking than generating language fragments.

Trying to eliminate cases where a stochastic model the size of an LLM gives “undesirable” or “untrue” responses seems rather odd.

ComplexSystems2• 11 months ago

Trying to eliminate cases where a stochastic model the size of an LLM gives “undesirable” or “untrue” responses seems rather odd.

Why? It seems no less odd than eliminating cases where it gives "undesirable" code snippets with hallucinated errors. This is very important and not odd at all.

rhubarbtree2• 11 months ago

To clarify, because you will be left with a biased language model. It will continue to hallucinate, and as you squeeze some hallucinations in one part of the language space you may well create new ones elsewhere. It doesn’t seem a solid line of attack

utyop224• 11 months ago

The reality is, language itself does not capture the entirety of what is really going on. And I'd get argue its the poorest way of expressing - but one that enables transmission through various mediums efficiently on a cost basis.

E.g. when I explain a concept, what comes to my mind is not a string of letters and words. There is a mix of imagery and even sounds that I may have acquired from learning about a concept - then I translate that into text so it can be communicated.

Theres a reason why people use native subtitles when watching netflix - text complements imagery and sounds.

pawelmurias• 11 months ago

I would assume most people use native subtitles when it's hard to understand what words the actors said.

kelnos2• 11 months ago

I use subtitles becomes sometimes I have trouble understanding the actors. I believe I read something that suggested that the sound mix in movies and cinematic TV shows has changed a lot in the past couple decades, and a result is that it's harder to understand dialogue.

I don't like this; I find my eyes spending more time than I'd like on the text, and not enough on the visual imagery on the rest of the screen. If I truly wanted more text, I'd just read a book.

didibus5• 11 months ago

I agree with everything you said except:

Trying to eliminate cases where a stochastic model the size of an LLM gives “undesirable” or “untrue” responses seems rather odd.

Take it back to what it is like you say, this is a predictive model, and the work of any ML scientist is to iterate on the model to try and get perfect accuracy on unseen data. It makes sense to want to tune the models to lower the rate of predictive errors. And because perfect predictive accuracy is rarely possible, you need to make judgment calls between precision and recall, which, in the case of LLMs, directly affects how often the model will hallucinate versus how often it will stay silent or overly cautious.

rubatuga• 11 months ago

But we're getting into the limits of knowledge and what is true/untrue. A stochastic model will be wrong sometimes.

munchler• 11 months ago

This is directly addressed in the article, which states that language models can be trained to abstain when uncertain, by changing how rewards are set up. Incentives currently encourage guessing rather than being honest about uncertainty. If you disagree, it would be helpful to explain why, rather than just responding to the title alone.

crabmusket2• 11 months ago

I don’t think that’s how humans work.

Every time this comes up I have to bring up Deutsch. He has the best description of intelligent cognition that I've come across. He takes Popper's "conjecture and criticism" approach to science and argues that this guess-and-check loop applies to all our thinking.

E.g. understanding spoken language has some elements of guessing what might have been said and checking that against the sounds we heard. Visual processing has similar analogies.

LLMs seem to be great at conjecturing stuff, but seem incapable of checking or even knowing they need to check.

codethief3• 11 months ago

Every time this comes up I have to bring up Deutsch. He has the best description of intelligent cognition that I've come across.

Would you have a reference?

crystal_revenge• 11 months ago

People also tend not to understand the absurdity of assuming that we can make LLMs stop hallucinating. It would imply not only that truth is absolutely objective, but that it exists on some smooth manifold which language can be mapped to.

That means there would be some high dimensional surface representing "all true things". Any fact could be trivially resolved as "true" or "false" simply by exploring whether or not it was represented on this surface. Where or not "My social security number is 123-45-6789" is true could be determined simply by checking whether or not that statement was mappable to the truth manifold. Likewise you could wander around that truth manifold and start generating output of all true things.

If such a thing existed it would make even the wildest fantasies about AGI seem tame.

edit: To simplify it further, this would imply you could have an 'is_true(statement: string): bool' function for any arbitrary statement in English.

mqus2• 11 months ago

Well, no. The article pretty much says that any arbitrary statement can be mapped to {true, false, I don't know}. This is still not 100% accurate, but at least something that seems reachable. The model should just be able to tell unknowns, not be able to verify every single fact.

thisoneisreal2• 11 months ago

A great book in this vein is "Language vs. Reality." The main thesis of the book is that language evolved to support approximate, ad hoc collaboration, and is woefully inadequate for doing the kind of work that e.g. scientists do, which requires incredible specificity and precision (hence the amount of effort devoted to definitions and quantification).

jdietrich• 11 months ago

People also tend not to understand the absurdity of assuming that we can make LLMs stop hallucinating. It would imply not only that truth is absolutely objective, but that it exists on some smooth manifold which language can be mapped to.

Frankly, this is a silly line of argument. There is a vast spectrum between regularly inventing non-existent citations and total omniscience. "We can't define objective truth" isn't a gotcha, it's just irrelevant.

Nobody in the field is talking about or working on completely eliminating hallucinations in some grand philosophical sense, they're just grinding away at making the error rate go down, because that makes models more useful. As shown in this article, relatively simple changes can have a huge effect and meaningful progress is being made very rapidly.

We've been here before, with scepticism about Wikipedia. A generation of teachers taught their students "you can't trust Wikipedia, because anyone can edit it". Two decades and a raft of studies later, it became clear that Wikipedia is at least as factually accurate as traditional encyclopedias and textbooks. The contemporary debate about the reliability of Wikipedia is now fundamentally the same as arguments about the reliability of any carefully-edited resource, revolving around subtle and insidious biases rather than blatant falsehoods.

Large neural networks do not have to be omniscient to be demonstrably more reliable than all other sources of knowledge, they just need to keep improving at their current rate for a few more years. Theoretical nitpicking is missing the forest for the trees - what we can empirically observe about the progress in AI development should have us bracing ourselves for radical social and economic transformation.

BobbyTables2• 11 months ago

Agree. I deeply suspect the problem of asking an LLM to not hallucinate is equivalent to the classic Halting Problem.

beeflet• 11 months ago

Maybe if a language model was so absolutely massive, it could <think> enough to simulate the entire universe and determine your social security number

asats• 11 months ago

Exactly. I always found it strange when people assume that "hallucinations" are just some sort of a bug in the system, as if by you tweaking some code or training modality will produce an oracle of absolute truth incapable of making mistakes.

thisoneisreal2• 11 months ago

This strikes me as a perfect description of the core problem. Whenever I think about this, what sticks out to me is that other animals do all sorts of things that look like "intelligence," or at least cognition, and they do it totally without language. My cat clearly recognizes objects, assigns them different values ("scary," "tasty," "fun to play with"), interacts with them in some kind of loop, even predicts their behavior to some extent and acts curious about them (it was really fun to watch her try to figure out the construction guys when I had some work done on my house over a period of a few days). These strike me as much more foundational aspects of intelligence than language. Language has of course immeasurably contributed to what makes human cognition and intelligence, but it's almost certainly built on these pre-linguistic foundations. Another very good hint in this direction is all of the non-verbal thinking that humans have done. Einstein has a famous quote about thinking visually and physically, without using language at all. All of these are powerful suggestions that something else is going on, and most likely some aspect of these things are necessary for true intelligence.

simianparrot• 11 months ago

I’ve always thought everyone agreed language was a lossy but useful method of compression for sharing inner concepts and ideas. That my conscious thoughts are “in a language” doesn’t mean my reasoning and entire being interacts with the world using language.

I’m only “thinking in language” when I’m practicing compressing my intent into a shareable format. I don’t think about the majority of highly complex interactions I have with the physical world throughout the day.

As a child did you need to be able to explain in language how the physics of a swing works to be able to use it? Did other kids have to explain it to you in detailed language for you to pick up on how to move your body to do complex tasks?

No. In fact exactly because our compression and decompression of language is even more limited as children, we rely more heavily on raw observation and mimicry of actions occurring in reality itself.

The very idea that a language model can recreate everything we do from the lossy and compressed languages we use to share limited descriptions of much more complex intentions and actions is fundamentally flawed and oversimplified.

humanfromearth92• 11 months ago

Humans think with inductive and deductive reasoning. First inductive, then we generalize and deduce, which allows for quick decision-making, hence increases our survival fitness. I don't know how the transition is done from inductive to deductive, and that's probably why currently, AI is not able to reason like humans.

cainxinth• 11 months ago

I find the leader board argument a little strange. All their enterprise clients are clamoring for more reliability from them. If they could train a model that conceded ignorance instead of guessing and thus avoid hallucinations, why aren't they doing that? Because of leader board optics?

ospray• 11 months ago

I think they are trying to communicate that their benchmarks will go down as they try to tackle hallucinations. Honestly I am surprised they didn't just say we think all benchmarks need a incorrect vs abstinence ratio so our cautious honest model can do well on that. Although they did seem to hint that's what they want.

jrm4• 11 months ago

Yeah, no, count me in with those who think that "All they do is hallucinate" is the correct way to say this and anything else dangerously obscures things.

More than anything, we need transparency on how these things work. For us and for the general public.

"Hallucination" introduces the dangerous idea that "them getting things wrong" is something like a "curable disease" and not "garbage in garbage out."

No. This is as stupid as saying Google telling me a restaurant is open when it's closed is a "hallucination." Stop personifying these things.

robertclaus• 11 months ago

While I get the academic perspective of sharing these insights, this article comes across as corporate justifying/complaining that their model's score is lower than it should be on the leaderboards... by saying the leaderboards are wrong.

Or an even darker take is that its coorporate saying they won't prioritize eliminating hallucinations until the leaderboards reward it.

skybrian3• 11 months ago

Yes, it's self-interested because they want to improve the leaderboards, which will help GPT-5 scores, but in the other hand, the changes they suggest seem very reasonable and will hopefully help everyone in the industry do better.

And I'm sure other people will complain if notice that changing the benchmarks makes things worse.

nurettin• 11 months ago

We program them to fill in the blanks, and then sit there wondering why they did.

Classic humans.

sp1982• 11 months ago

This makes sense. I recently did an experiment to test GPT5 on hallucinations on cricket data where there is a lot of statistical pressure. It is far better to say idk than a wrong answer. Most current benchmarks don’t test for that. https://kaamvaam.com/machine-learning-ai/llm-eval-hallucinat...

amw-zero• 11 months ago

I love the euphemistic thinking. “We built something that legitimately doesn’t do the thing that we advertise, but when it doesn’t do it we shall deem that hallucination.”

didibus5• 11 months ago

When tuning predictive models you always have to balance precision and recall because 100% accuracy is never going to happen.

In LLMs that balance shows up as how often the model hallucinates versus how often it says it doesn’t know. If you push toward precision you end up with a model that constantly refuses: What’s the X of Y? I don’t know. Can you implement a function that does K? I don’t know how. What could be the cause of G? I can’t say. As a user that gets old fast, you just want it to try, take a guess, let you be the judge of it.

Benchmarks and leaderboards usually lean toward recall because a model that always gives it a shot creates a better illusion of intelligence, even if some of those shots are wrong. That illusion keeps users engaged, which means more users and more money.

And that's why LLM hallucinates :P

Difwif• 11 months ago

It would be interesting to see two versions of a model. A primary model tuned for precision that's focused on correctness that works with or orchestrates a creative model that's tuned for generating new (and potentially incorrect) ideas. The primary model is responsible for evaluating and reasoning about the ideas/hallucinations. Feels like a left/right brain architecture (even though that's an antiquated model of human brain hemispheres).

the_af• 11 months ago

Some people here in the comments are arguing that the LLM "understands" what is "true" and "false", that is somewhat capable of reasoning, etc, but I still find it quite easy (with GPT-5) to break its facade of "reasoning".

I asked it to play a word game. This is very simple, and a very short session too. It failed in its very first response, and then it failed in explaining why it failed. All with total confidence, no hesitation.

Nobody fluent in English would fail so catastrophically. I actually expected it to succeed:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcb490-a5b4-8013-b2be-35d27962ad...

It's clear by this failure model the LLM doesn't understand anything.

Edit: to be clear, as the session goes longer it becomes more interesting, but you can still trip the LLM up in ways no human "understanding" the game would. My 6-year old plays this game better, because she truly understands... she can trip up, but not like this.

d4rkn0d3z• 11 months ago

This is a case of the metric becoming the target. The tools used to evaluate LLM performance are shaping the LLM. First you make your tools then your tools make you.

If we take a formal systems approach, then an LLM is a model of a complex hierarchy of production rules corresponding to the various formal and informal grammatical, logical, and stylistic rules and habits employed by humans to form language that expresses their intelligence. It should not be surprising that simply executing the production rules, or a model thereof, will give rise to sentences that cannot be assigned a meaning. It should also give rise to sentences that we cannot prove or make sense of immediately but we would not want to discard these due to uncertainty. Why? because every once in a while the sentence that would be culled is actually the stroke of brilliance we are looking for, uncertainty be damned. The citation here would be literally nearly every discovery ever made.

When I recall information and use it, when I "think", I don't just produce sentences by the rules, formal and informal, I don't consider at all how often I have seen one word precede another in past, rather as I meandre the landscape of a given context, a thought manifold if you will, I am constantly evaluating whether this is in contradiction with that, if this can be inferred from that via induction or deduction, does this preclude that, etc.. That is the part that is missing from an LLM; The uncanny ability of the human mind to reproduce the entire manifold of concepts as they relate to one another in a mesh from any small piece of the terrain that it might recall, and to verify anew that they all hang together unsupported by one's own biases.

The problem is that just as the scarcity of factual information in the corpus makes it difficult to produce, so is actual reasoning rarefied among human language samples. Most of what appears as reasoning is language games and will to power. The act of reasoning in an unbiased way is so foreign to humans, so painful and arduous, so much like bending over backwards or swimming upstream against a strong current of will to power, that almost nobody does it for long.

hankchinaski• 11 months ago

because they are glorified markov chains?

mqus2• 11 months ago

I think one of the main problems is the dataset it is trained on, which is written text. How much answers with statements are in a given text, compared to a "I don't know"? I think the "I don't know"s are much less represented. Now go anywhere on the internet where someone asks a question (the typical kind of content LLMs are trained on) and the problem is even bigger. You either get no textual answer or someone that gives some answer (that might even be false). You never get an answer like "I don't know", especially for questions that are shouted into the void (compared to asking a certain person). And it makes sense. I wouldn't start to answer every stackoverflow question with "I don't know" tomorrow, it would just be spam.

For me, as a layman (with no experience at all about how this actually works), this seems to be the cause. Can we work around this? Maybe.

williamtrask• 11 months ago

IMO - this paper is right about a major contributing factor to hallucinations but wrong about the cause

LLM hallucinations are closer to a cache miss.

https://x.com/iamtrask/status/1964403351116009671

Waterluvian• 11 months ago

Abstaining is part of humility, one of OpenAI’s core values .

Is this PR fluff or do organizations and serious audiences take this kind of thing seriously?

Pocomon• 11 months ago

The output of language models can be considered a form of hallucination because these models do not possess real understanding or factual knowledge about the underlying concepts. Instead, they generate text by statistically predicting and assembling words based on vast training data and the input prompts, without true comprehension.

Since the training data can contain inaccuracies, conflicting information, or low-frequency facts that are essentially random, models can produce plausible-sounding but false statements. Unlike humans, language models have no awareness or grounding in real-world concepts; their generation is essentially an amalgam of stored patterns and input cues rather than grounded knowledge.

Furthermore, evaluation methods that reward accuracy without penalizing guessing encourage models to produce confident but incorrect answers rather than admit uncertainty or abstain from answering. This challenge is intrinsic to how language models generate fluent language: they lack external verification or true understanding, making hallucinations an inherent characteristic of their outputs rather than a malfunction.

| a. What's with the -minus votes?

| b. I was only quoting ChatGPT :]

robotcapital2• 11 months ago

It’s interesting that most of the comments here read like projections of folk-psych intuitions. LLMs hallucinate because they “think” wrong, or lack self-awareness, or should just refuse. But none of that reflects how these systems actually work. This is a paper from a team working at the state of the art, trying to explain one of the biggest open challenges in LLMs, and instead of engaging with the mechanisms and evidence, we’re rehashing gut-level takes about what they must be doing. Fascinating.

zahlman• 11 months ago

Calling it a "hallucination" is anthropomorphizing too much in the first place, so....

robotcapital2• 11 months ago

Right, that’s kind of my point. We call it “hallucination” because we don’t understand it, but need a shorthand to convey the concept. Here’s a paper trying to demystify it so maybe we don’t need to make up anthropomorphized theories.

razzmatazmania• 11 months ago

Confabulation is human behavioral phenomena that is not all that uncommon. Have you ever heard a grandpa big fish story? Have you ever pretended to know something you didn't because you wanted approval or to feel confident? Have you answered a test question wrong when you thought you were right? What I find fascinating about these models is they are already more intelligent and reliable than the worst humans. I've known plenty of people who struggle to conceptualize and connect information and are helpless outside of dealing with familiar series of facts or narratives. That these models aren't even as large as human brains makes me suspect that practical hardware limits might still be in play here.

renewiltord• 11 months ago

It's always the most low-brow takes as well. But the majority of Hacker News commentators "hallucinate" most of their comments in the first place, since they simply regurgitate the top answers based on broad bucketing of subject matter.

Facebook? "Steal your data"

Google? "Kill your favourite feature"

Apple? "App Store is enemy of the people"

OpenAI? "More like ClosedAI amirite"

KajMagnus2• 11 months ago

Yes, many _humans_ here hallucinate, sort of.

They apparently didn't read the article, or didn't understand i, or disregard from it. (Why, why, why?)

And they fail to realize that they don't know what they are talking about, nevertheless keep talking. Similar to an over confident AI.

On a discussion about hallucinating AIs, the humans start hallucinating.

KajMagnus2• 11 months ago

Could one say that humans are trained very differently from AIs?

If we (humans) make confident guesses, but are wrong — then, others will look at us disappointedly, thinking "oh s/he doesn't know what s/he is talking about, I'm going to trust them a bit less hereafter". And we'll tend to feel shame and want to withdraw.

That's a pretty strong punishment, for being confidently wrong? Not that odd, then, that humans say "I'm not sure" more often than AIs?

yreg2• 11 months ago

Maybe it goes against the definition but I like saying that _all_ output is a hallucination, when explaining LLMs.

It just happens that a lot of that output is useful/corresponding with the real world.

kelnos2• 11 months ago

Well yes, it goes against the accepted definition. And if all output is hallucination, then it's not really a useful way to describe anything, so why bother?

drekipus• 11 months ago

But it's the perfect definition because it shows what it is. The output is a hallucination in what it thinks you want, which you can use for better form prompts or the like.

To say "it only hallucinates sometimes" is burying the lede and confusing for people who are trying to use it

Q: How do I stop Hallucinations? A: useless question, because you can't. It is the mechanism that gives you what you want

MattPalmer1086• 11 months ago

I agree that saying everything is a hallucination doesn't help to narrow down on possible solutions.

It does however make the point that hallucinations are not some special glitch which is distinct from the normal operation of the model. It's just outputting plausible text, which is right often enough to be useful.

Adding in some extra sauce to help the model evaluate the correctness of answers, or when it doesn't know enough to give a good answer, is obviously one way to mitigate this otherwise innate behaviour.

yreg2• 11 months ago

I find it useful to underline the intrinsic properties of LLMs. When an LLM makes up something untrue, it's not a 'bug'.

I think that thinking of all LLM output as 'hallucinations' while making use of the fact that these hallucinations are often true for the real world is a good mindset, especially for nontechnical people, who might otherwise not realise.

humanfromearth92• 11 months ago

LLMs do not hallucinate. They just choose the most probabilistic next token. Sometimes, we, humans, interpret this as hallucinating, not knowing any better, not having any better vocabulary, but being able to refrain from anthropomorphizing the machine.

andy12_• 11 months ago

They just choose the most probabilistic next token

That does not imply that a model should hallucinate. A trivial counterexample is a small LLM trained up to 100% accuracy to output x mod 100 for any input x in the range 0-1000000 and "I don't know" for any other input that is not a number in that range. Such model does not hallucinate, even if it's still just a probabilistic autoreggressive next token predictor. In fact, this is a point argued in this paper

Hallucinations are inevitable only for base models. Many have argued that hallucinations are inevitable (Jones, 2025; Leffer, 2024; Xu et al., 2024). However, a non-hallucinating model could be easily created, using a question-answer database and a calculator, which answers a fixed set of questions such as “What is the chemical symbol for gold?” and well-formed mathematical calculations such as “3 + 8”, and otherwise outputs IDK. Moreover, the error lower-bound of Corollary 1 implies that language models which do not err must not be calibrated, i.e., δ must be large. As our derivations show, calibration-and, hence, errors—is a natural consequence of the standard cross-entropy objective. Indeed, empirical studies (Fig. 2) show that base models are often found to be calibrated, in contrast to post-trained models which may deviate from cross-entropy in favor of reinforcement learning.

ahmedgmurtaza• 11 months ago

Totally agreed with majorrity of the views

awongh• 11 months ago

From an outsider perspective these kinds of insights make me think: Is it just a coincidence that a lot of the recent innovations in the space look very common sense in hindsight:

- if we train the model to "think" through the answer, we get better results - if we train the model to say "I don't know" when it's not sure we get less hallucinations

Is it just confirmation bias or do these common sense approaches work in on LLMs in other ways?

drudolph914• 11 months ago

I am an educator alongside being an engineer, so I've had to think about how to explain this topic to people in ways that give them some kind of intuition/insight. I don't have a good take for non-stem people, but I think I have a better explanation for people who are CS adjacent

I like to explain this whole hallucination problem by stating that LLMs are 2 different machines working together. one half of the machine is all the knowledge it was trained on, and you can think of this knowledge as an enormous classic tree you learn in CS classes; and each node in this tree is a token. the other half of the machine is a program that walks through this enormous tree and prints the token it's on

when you think of it like this, 3 things become immediately obvious

1. LLMs are a totally deterministic machine

2. you can make them seem smart by randomizing the walk through the knowledge tree

3. hallucinations are a side effect of trying to randomize the knowledge tree walk

I find it interesting that LLM companies are trying to fix such a fundamental problem by training the model to always guess the correct path. the problem I see with this approach is that 2 people can enter the same input text, but want 2 different outputs. if there isn't always a _correct path_ then you can't really fix the problem.

the only 2 options you have to “improve” things is prune and or add better data to the knowledge tree, or you’re trying the make the program that walks the knowledge tree take better paths.

the prune/add data approach is slightly better because it’s improving the quality of the token output. but the downside is you quickly realize that you need a fire hose of new human data to keep improving - but much of the data out there is starting to be generated by the LLMs - which leads to this inbreeding effect where the model gets worse

the 2nd approach feels less ideal because it will slow down the process of generating tokens.

all of this to say, from this point on, it’s just hacks, ducktape, and bandaids

sfink• 11 months ago

I have mixed feelings about AI, but love the posts and papers that dig into how they work. Except, as this post shows, I seem to vastly prefer Anthropic's posts to OpenAI's.

Claim: Hallucinations are inevitable.
Finding: They are not, because language models can abstain when uncertain.

Please go back to your marketing cave. "Claim: You'll get wet if it rains. Finding: You will not, because you can check the weather report and get inside before it starts raining."

Sure, language models could abstain when uncertain. That would remove some hallucinations [a word which here means, make statements that are factually untrue. Never mind that that's often what we want them to do.] Or when certain about something that their training data is flawed or incomplete about. Or when certain about something but introspection shows that the chain of activations goes through territory that often produces hallucinations. Or when certain about something that is subjective.

"Uncertainty" is a loaded term; these things don't think in the way that the definition of the word "certain" is based on, since it's based on human thought. But that aside, LLM uncertainty is very obviously a promising signal to take into account, and it's interesting to see what costs and benefits that has. But eliminating one cause does not prove that there are no other causes, nor does it address the collateral damage.

"Write me a story about Bill."

"I'm sorry Dave, Bill is hypothetical and everything I could say about him would be a hallucination."

"Write a comment for the function `add(a, b) = a + b`."

"// This function takes two numbers and adds them toget... I'm sorry Dave, I don't know how many bits these numbers are, what the behavior on overflow is, or whether to include the results of extreme voltage fluctuations. As a result, I can't produce a comment that would be true in all circumstances and therefore any comment I write could be construed as a hallucination."

parentheses2• 11 months ago

I think a large issue at play here is post training. Pre training models the original distribution of input data. RL techniques tweak the models to "behave". This step changes how the models "think" in a fundamental way .

marbartolome• 10 months ago

Anyone else getting an annoying auto-translation of the article? Browsing from Spain and it seems impossible to toggle to the original English writeup. Hating this trend.

Why language models hallucinate

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