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GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

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Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#21
I think hallucination rates are not a matter of model size but depends on the training of the model. They have been trained on a huge corpus of material that had overwhelmingly well formed questions and we'll formulated and correct answers. This is typically the case of books where the material is highly curated by experts in the field. In a book you never see a question which admit no answer and the book just reasoning and explaining why and how the question has no answer. Neither you will see a good question and the book explaining candidly it doesn't know the answer , because the way the book material is curated the author will omit discussing the question for which it has no answers.

In addition, I think that during HFRL, the labs has a bias for interesting answers that admit a solution and under represent the "bad" questions that admit no good answer. In addition they probably do less effort to HFRL on questions the model should admit it doesn't know.

As humans we have been trained all our lives, in the real world, to be confronted with questions we don't know the response right away and we learned to very quickly assess that we don't know or that we are not sure about the answer.

Another thing we have and LLM have not is fear. We have an amygdala in our brain, separated from the logic thinking part, that can raise a signal of fear so that we get much more carefully about what we say. On the other LLM has no fear organ like the amygdala and just learn to respond based on the patterns in it's training corpus. It never "fears" looking bad or being fired because it gave a wrong answer so it can merrily give perfectly wrong answers.

So, we see hallucination rates can be improved with training but currently the lab are not optimizing for that because there is an high stake race to get the most intelligent and capable model.

Alternatively I can see creating a separate amygdala-like organ for an LLM and that organ may asynchronously fires signal, based on the user prompt and the LLM thinking trace, to inject into the LLM reasoning a fear signal so that it can steer it's answer to something more safe.

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#22

Hallucination rate scores are a little tricky to interpret because they're conditional on the model not knowing the answer. That means they don't measure the probability of your encountering a hallucination in everyday use, since that also depends on the probability of the model not knowing the answer, as well as how well your distribution of tasks aligns with the distribution tested in the eval. I'd also hesitate to…

> Hallucination rate scores are a little tricky to interpret because they're conditional on the model not knowing the answer. That means they don't measure the probability of your encountering a hallucination in everyday use, since that also depends on the probability of the model not knowing the answer, as well as how well your distribution of tasks aligns with the distribution tested in the eval. Do you have a cite…

there is a difference between a human knowingly bullshitting and being confident because he misremembers something

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#23

I think hallucination rates are not a matter of model size but depends on the training of the model. They have been trained on a huge corpus of material that had overwhelmingly well formed questions and we'll formulated and correct answers. This is typically the case of books where the material is highly curated by experts in the field. In a book you never see a question which admit no answer and the book just reason…

I'd definitely agree that it isn't directly model size, but there is the fact that a larger model in terms of parameter count needs a large amount of training data to not overfit or underfit. So I think this race to the top of "max training data size" has kind of led to unintentional overfitting, not catastrophically, but enough to trigger this perceived omniscience within the model

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are abysmal. Should we really be using LLMs to write our code? I have a theory- LLMs can spit out code that gets the job done and looks ok, maybe even great, but contains small “anomalies” that compound over time. An enterprise app developed entirely with LLM-happy devs might end up virtually unmaintainable. I’m not sure how to explain it, but the more I see LLM-written code the more I feel it’s bad cod…

Have you worked with enterprise apps? The ones I have used for decades are hot garbages.

Now imagine decades of LLM code. Extrapolating the rate of increase of LoC, the source code ain't gonna fit on hard drives anymore.

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#27
post #26

The fact that a huge amount uf parameters may lead to worse hallucinations is something I didn't think of. Would this somewhat imply that DeepSeek V4 flash should be less prone tho these issues?

Surprisingly not! It is the biggest hallucinator on the AA Omniscience Index just 2pp away from V4 Pro. I think this is partially due to the fact that Flash was trained on >32T tokens just like Pro deapite being almost 10x smaller - it seems somewhat likely it was overfit.

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#28

> For the non technical, this is like asking a delivery driver to drop off packages at 3 houses at the same time without ever stopping the truck. I'm already hallucinating about how this could work and it involves catapults

Or we could simply hallucinate that the packages are there at the three houses.

Hallucinations all the way down...

Re: GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

#29

Hallucination rate scores are a little tricky to interpret because they're conditional on the model not knowing the answer. That means they don't measure the probability of your encountering a hallucination in everyday use, since that also depends on the probability of the model not knowing the answer, as well as how well your distribution of tasks aligns with the distribution tested in the eval. I'd also hesitate to…

Those numbers are abysmal. Should we really be using LLMs to write our code? I have a theory- LLMs can spit out code that gets the job done and looks ok, maybe even great, but contains small “anomalies” that compound over time. An enterprise app developed entirely with LLM-happy devs might end up virtually unmaintainable. I’m not sure how to explain it, but the more I see LLM-written code the more I feel it’s bad cod…

Not my observation. If you never look at the code and dont have basic guardrails in place (linters, architecture tests, some guidelines for best practices) - probably.

But as soon as you do minimal reviews and high-level corrections, applications turn out just fine.

Can there be bugs? Sure. That's the price of not reading or understanding every line. It should depend on the criticality of your software how much of these you tolerate and how much you don't (reviewing, understanding, testing everything 100% like you were used to if you had written it yourself will kill most if not all of your gained speed)

But I never got the impression of unmaintainability or unfixable bugs.

Actually the other side around: A really good cleanup pass, architectural changes, or bugfixes are seldom more than a few prompts and 2 hours away, provided your overall base is decent and you actually gave a fuck from the start.

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