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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are we concluding that bigger models and more data = more hallucination? That’s not what your quotes said. They said bigger models = plateau in intelligence, nothing about more data or increased hallucinations The relevant quote for what you’re talking about would be: > It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer.…

I find these internet arguments talking about LLMs as if they are trained by reading the internet to be wild. Yes, pretraining still exists. But for the past few years, pretraining by reading the internet is just the initial bootstrapping of LLM training. The RL training they get from bespoke training data, with very very different characteristics than what these armchair analyses claim, dominates these days.

I'd have to imagine there are wildly diminishing marginal returns to additional SFT/post-training passes.

There are a bounded number of (useful) derivations/combinations of Duff's device.

If Frontier Labs wish to reduce hallucinations on factual things, they will have to hire people (or the data providers will need to) to do fundamental research above and beyond what is available in extant literature and the web. IE if the LLMs want to lower precision error, they need to go out and actually find more expertise. If the wikipedia page for Pompey lacks data, where are they going to get it from? How would they even _identify_ that the page has holes?

Yes, they can digitize more books but that is untrustworthy data - if there were enough eyeballs on a particular work, it would be in the internet. If it's not, they'd need to hire the experts themselves. They need expert reviewers in virtually every interesting topic, which fundamentally is an intractable problem, especially since things change all the time. Maybe even uninteresting topics, too?

I dunno, it doesn't seem to me "more data" is the magic bullet here. Yeah, it will "help" but we're already on the flat part of the S shaped curve.

My take from trying to understand this stuff is some sort of algorithmic improvement is necessary to get another step change in how well LLMs perform in this area. I could be wrong!

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

#182

> it is clear that actual intelligence has plateaued significantly. > Moving forward, the industry cannot continue to train bigger and bigger models since their intelligence not only plateaus but often will get worse These are wild claims - why are we concluding that bigger models and more data = more hallucination? That’s actually the opposite of what’s been happening over the last couple years. Some models may stil…

to train models to be smarter than they are, one needs examples and cases to train on, and once you get close to the top percentiles of human reasoning there is extremely little such material available.

You can create contrived logic problems, but they often turn into language games because English is not formal logic.

And you can train on "monty hall" style problems, but those too are language games that are intriguing to humans but obvious when framed slightly differently.

In other words, model trainers are fighting against the overwhelming mediocrity of the training corpus (all of the recorded human output from history).

As models improve, the next phase will be models co-designed with humans to overcome these limits. The way we use language and the process we use to problem solve (we currently call this "orchestration") will evolve as part of this. Meatspace metaphors map badly when we have massive context and don't need the same limits. How different is hallucination from extrapolation, etc.

Much of the skepticism and confusion about LLMs is no different than a person of average intelligence hearing a highly intelligent person explain something and considering the explanation gibberish, then arrogantly accusing the intelligent person of being unhelpful.

Much like dogs were domesticated from wolves to have traits that make them good around humans, LLMs will evolve around our limits, around our arrogance, around our aesthetic biases and prejudices. Intelligence and rationality is fundamentally not what most humans want from an LLM.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are we concluding that bigger models and more data = more hallucination? That’s not what your quotes said. They said bigger models = plateau in intelligence, nothing about more data or increased hallucinations The relevant quote for what you’re talking about would be: > It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer.…

Yeah #2 may be incidental. Suppose one lab focused on bigger, and another on reinforcement training geared towards factual accuracy over sycophancy. You could easily wind up with a model from the second lab that is less powerful but more accurate. I can’t prove it but I suspect there’s a bit of that going on.

I think one problem is that the models that hallucinate often, a few times out of 8 or 16 so that they get good results on benchmarks, most of which measures success out of top k. From benchmark perspective, you don't really care whether 15 of yours 16 generations failed, as long as one succeeded, but as a user you mostly care that 1 out of 16 you get is actually the successful one. I think this effects is more easy to see on Gemini Flash, it hallucinates like crazy but looks like its by design to boost benchmarks.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do they get the bespoke training data from? And how much? I don’t really know anything about this.

Companies like Mercor sell data from human experts

Offhand, do you know what format that data is in? Is it a question and then a human answering that question? Mostly just curious at to what the training data consists of.

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

#185
DS v4 is an undertrained snapshot, which is mentioned in their model card. The full version is supposed to be released later and have multimodal input. That said, hallucination rate likely depends on the training policy and different optimization tradeoffs a lot more than on the scale.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find these internet arguments talking about LLMs as if they are trained by reading the internet to be wild. Yes, pretraining still exists. But for the past few years, pretraining by reading the internet is just the initial bootstrapping of LLM training. The RL training they get from bespoke training data, with very very different characteristics than what these armchair analyses claim, dominates these days.

I'd have to imagine there are wildly diminishing marginal returns to additional SFT/post-training passes. There are a bounded number of (useful) derivations/combinations of Duff's device. If Frontier Labs wish to reduce hallucinations on factual things, they will have to hire people (or the data providers will need to) to do fundamental research above and beyond what is available in extant literature and the web. IE…

As a side gig, I write novel software that solves problems no existing software does, that existing LLMs have difficulty reproducing, purely for the purpose of existing as LLM training data.

There are journalists being hired to write Atlantic-worthy articles that exist only as LLM training data, because they're getting paid more than the Atlantic would pay them for it.

It's insane.

Yes, they are hiring the experts themselves. To create new knowledge above and beyond what's on the internet. To be locked away as LLM training data.

The largest characteristic of all of this new data is it is targeted at LLM's weak points.

It's not just more data, it's custom tutorials built for what LLMs struggle at.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like Mercor sell data from human experts

Offhand, do you know what format that data is in? Is it a question and then a human answering that question? Mostly just curious at to what the training data consists of.

The most advanced training data is in the form of rubrics as rewards.

A human asks a question, then writes rubrics to judge the LLMs response, so rather than evaluating a specific response, those rubrics can live on as the LLM evolves and gives different answers. There are more complex variants as well, but that's the basic principle.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17746

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to imagine there are wildly diminishing marginal returns to additional SFT/post-training passes. There are a bounded number of (useful) derivations/combinations of Duff's device. If Frontier Labs wish to reduce hallucinations on factual things, they will have to hire people (or the data providers will need to) to do fundamental research above and beyond what is available in extant literature and the web. IE…

As a side gig, I write novel software that solves problems no existing software does, that existing LLMs have difficulty reproducing, purely for the purpose of existing as LLM training data. There are journalists being hired to write Atlantic-worthy articles that exist only as LLM training data, because they're getting paid more than the Atlantic would pay them for it. It's insane. Yes, they are hiring the experts th…

What kind of programs? Can you give an example of the tasks?

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to imagine there are wildly diminishing marginal returns to additional SFT/post-training passes. There are a bounded number of (useful) derivations/combinations of Duff's device. If Frontier Labs wish to reduce hallucinations on factual things, they will have to hire people (or the data providers will need to) to do fundamental research above and beyond what is available in extant literature and the web. IE…

As a side gig, I write novel software that solves problems no existing software does, that existing LLMs have difficulty reproducing, purely for the purpose of existing as LLM training data. There are journalists being hired to write Atlantic-worthy articles that exist only as LLM training data, because they're getting paid more than the Atlantic would pay them for it. It's insane. Yes, they are hiring the experts th…

1. How did you land the side gig? Mercor or a lessor known brand?

2. What criteria do such vendors typically require?

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