The constant mental vigilance in a generative world is exhausting.

"I asked Claude to do $thing and it did this!"

No it didn't. No you didn't. Probably none of that happened.

And somehow, being unwilling to admit the thing is just making stuff up is annoying and unnecessary, not the damn model.

@mttaggart

I can't get people to understand that the "hallucination" problem is unsolvable because "hallucination" is how it works. That's all it does. Next tokens based on the whole previous series of tokens that represent "the conversation" being had between prompts and responses combined with the hidden prompts that give the thing its flavor. The fact that it is "right" isn't part of it. That's why they never say, "I don't know". They don't know anything. They are literally making it up every single time. It's why they are so expensive and why they are ruining the environment. There is no recall, no memory, no "knowing". As I've seen it said elsewhere, "there is no 'there' there". It's worse than the Chinese Room thought experiment because at least that produces correct responses. This creates the illusion of a correct response. We are killing the earth and building an inescapable surveillance state around technology that will never get any better than it is right now.

@jrdepriest @mttaggart hallucination is an awful term for it; it implies a form of perception that is being undermined, when no such perception exists. A philosophy professor of mine refers to model output as "bullshit" in that it does not distinct between truth and falsehood, only seeking to accurately reproduce langauage patterns.

@fireye @jrdepriest @mttaggart

In reality, its high dimensional vector calculus, over the trained material and your words in your context.

All this LLM workings is just vector calculus, that Leibniz devised in the 1700s. We only had the compute to do it in 2012.

Its not thinking, yet. Its not intelligence. Its a stochastic parrot trained on TBs of data, following Leibniz' dream of word-calculus.

We still dont know how consciousness works, or to create a thinking machine.