Thread

1. drtgh · 1789758284 · focus · HN ↗

   > relatively poorly understood technology

   Poorly understood? how convenient...

   LLMs are vectorial databases with losses that index statistically filled data, which uses a text interface to query such statistically filled data. The output is a string concatenation (statistically concatenated bit by bit).

   When the LLMs are queried (prompted), you can get random mixed data as output, ERRORS, due to undesired indexes getting closer at one point while the string was being concatenated for the output, what affects the rest of the indexed content that will be concatenated.

   It is intrinsic to this tech. The larger the context, the greater the probability of get mixed data. And if the provider lowers the precision of those indexes -in order to decrease hardware resources and energy consumption- such probability increases to the point where those errors are granted.

   Even knowing that the queries can return wrong/mixed data in the responses, errors, the companies developing this, decided to introduce a new product, that connects such LLMs outputs to the command console, latter connected to internet, raw 'eval' running commands from such outputs witch obviously can contain whatever mixed random. Then we started to hear "oh, it deleted my directory", etc, and it seems the next one will be "a missile killed my wife", because it is a text concatenation engine with errors.

   To name it "hallucination" is an euphemism... those are errors, and they are granted to happen at one moment. If they do not know this, then they ate too much marketing without doing their job, or it was a convenient contract for the pocket$ of someone.

   1. margalabargala · 1789758879 · focus · HN ↗

      I agree with most of your comment, but...

      > To name it "hallucination" is an euphemism... those are errors

      I find this and other "don't anthropomorphize the computer" statements incredibly unconvincing.

      People develop terms for things and language has always contained overloaded or "literally inaccurate" terms.

      An LLM can have "hallucinations" in the same way a modern computer program can have "bugs".

      1. usernomdeguerre · 1789759667 · focus · HN ↗

         I disagree, I think 'Hallucination' is a risk-shedding weasel-word. It's meant to shift blame away from the technology and its creator (multibillion dollar AI companies etc) in a way that doesn't hold those actors accountable or responsible for the outcomes.

         In any other software it would be an error, regression, bug. And in a human process it would be at ~least something someone would call 'bullshit'.

         1. leonidasrup · 1789761978 · focus · HN ↗

            Using the term "Hallucination" makes it sound less problematic, less impactfull for user.

            They should have used the term "error". For example in statistics, there many kinds of errors, discretization error, prediction error, sampling error, ...

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statisticshowto.com&#x2F;errors-in-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statisticshowto.com&#x2F;errors-in-statistics&#x2F;

            1. lukan · 1789762303 · focus · HN ↗

               I don&#x27;t know, but all humans make errors, but if some humans are known to hallucinate, you don&#x27;t let them do important things unsupervised. So error sounds actually less problematic to me.

               1. verdverm · 1789763311 · focus · HN ↗

                  We do a surprising amount of &quot;hallucinations&quot; without the extreme version of hallucinations. We assemble things we sort of remember into incorrect statements all the time. I&#x27;m sure every one of us has been corrected for misremembering something or stating something based on misremembered facts (plague of clickbait headlines).

                  This is more or less how I see the LLM output, but as a path finding exercise over next-token probability graphs. This is (i.e.) why they are trained to use phrases like &quot;wait but&quot; or &quot;actually&quot;, these words even out the probability of different paths, giving them their ability to &quot;consider&quot; different solutions.

               2. leonidasrup · 1789763372 · focus · HN ↗

                  Because so few humans hallucinate, many imagine hallucinations like dreams and dreams are mostly harmless.

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