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Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

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31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#31
We're being forced to use some AI features in our IDE at work these days, and we see it make stuff up all the time. Very unpleasant to work with. It will tell us implementing something a certain way is impossible, when I've implemented it myself that way in the past. It will fabricate reasons why builds are failing. It will make assumptions about database schemas from thin air.

It's like a science fiction writer or an improv actor doing technobabble. If by chance it knows the actual answer it might use it, but even if not it still has to say _something_ that sounds plausible to a layperson. It'll never say it doesn't actually know, because their character it's acting as _should_ know.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#33
There has been quite significant progress.

From my experience it has been largely solved for one significant use case which is chatting to frontier models about the reality as described by public knowledge. 2 years ago models would rely on their training data, today they go out of their way trying to look it up on the Internet and verify thoroughly. I have not had a problem for a very long time.

When working off of limited, private/unverifiable context, LLMs still hallucinate, but again, much less than 2 years ago, and more within a "getting confused where a human would easily get confused" range, rather than "outrageously making things up" range.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#34
post #3

I think its solved, with the right setup and model. I couldn't tell u the last time my agent hallucinated. For me I consider it solved. However some dude feeding massive docs into gpt chat and long conversations, It is not solved in this context.

Man there really isn’t a criticism that won’t lead to a booster saying you’re holding it wrong

It matches the reality of my experience using a good frontier like Sol on high to ultra thinking. If it has any way to verify its work whatsoever, it eventually gets to a working and sanely-engineered solution. Blatant hallucinations making it to the final stages have become extremely rare in my use cases, nonexistent if the model has a valid feedback loop. So yes, I will insist someone is likely "holding it wrong" if they still think SOTA AI is spewing out garbage at this stage when I can have it do something like write entire working kernel module fixes for old MacBooks on a whim with no crashes or flaws observed after months of use.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#35
It hasn't and likely never will because it is a structural part of how AI works.

You can see proof of this if you ask it obscure enough questions. That doesn't mean obscure scientific questions, I asked it questions regarding ship fits and modules in EVE Online, which is an extremely well-documented videogame. There are hundreds of online tools to help you for different things, mining yield calculators and more.

Well, ChatGPT just made up almost everything. Very confidently. It couldn't even get the damage types right, I was quite shocked.

Hallucination has only be solved for extremely narrow sets of problems, and only partially. Coding is one of those problems.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man there really isn’t a criticism that won’t lead to a booster saying you’re holding it wrong

It matches the reality of my experience using a good frontier like Sol on high to ultra thinking. If it has any way to verify its work whatsoever, it eventually gets to a working and sanely-engineered solution. Blatant hallucinations making it to the final stages have become extremely rare in my use cases, nonexistent if the model has a valid feedback loop. So yes, I will insist someone is likely "holding it wrong" i…

I think this is the issue others are having, when you say:

> when I can have it do something like write entire working kernel module fixes for old MacBooks on a whim

They’re not saying it can’t do that, and that’s not proof it doesn’t hallucinate. In fact, having used 6-8 agents at a time for a year plus while writing AI tooling for an AI startup, I can definitely surely tell you that they’re almost inversely correlated as in models that hallucinate a lot sometimes also put out the best most impressive solutions.

I’m definitely not anti AI and I definitely have found a way to make it work very well and I’m content with the work I get out of it (again maxing out several max 20x subs), but I have had sol definitely hallucinate this week and I’m a bit shocked you’re trying to say otherwise.

Listen I know it’s going to be I’m holding it wrong too, but I’ve been reading white papers and research on LLMs for a long time and was definitely at the cutting edge of context engineering, implementing features in our tooling harness a year before they were in codex or Claude.

maybe I am holding it wrong still but but like at some point if I’m holding it wrong who else will be holding it right? Dozens of people? At some point, the technology has to be approachable enough for everyone to have your point of view automatically.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#37
I don't have a problem with hallucinations, rather the confabulations.

We want AI to make predictions under uncertainty that could be wrong. What we don't need is getting know facts wrong.

One of the best responses I got from ChatGPT was when it said "I don't know", and on questioning it - it responded that it was an unsolved problem and it couldn't objectively take a side iun the argument.

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#38

The problem hasn't been solved, and, by the very nature of what LLMs are, can't be. However, it has gotten a lot better, as models have got much larger and pretraining more sophisticated. Part of the difficulty--not in solving, but in discussing--is in defining what a hallucination is. On the face of it, it seems straightforward: an obviously counterfactual claim or manifest error of reasoning. However, it's not alwa…

I prefer to say that it's all hallucinations so the time... we just happen to like some portion of them.

_______

> In fact [The Bursar] was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.

> This had worked well. There had been a few false starts. For several hours, at one point, he had hallucinated that he was a bookcase. But now he was permanently hallucinating that he was a bursar, and that almost made up for the small side-effect that also led him to hallucinate that he could fly.

The Truth (2000) by Terry Pratchett

Re: Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?

#39

It hasn't and likely never will because it is a structural part of how AI works. You can see proof of this if you ask it obscure enough questions. That doesn't mean obscure scientific questions, I asked it questions regarding ship fits and modules in EVE Online, which is an extremely well-documented videogame. There are hundreds of online tools to help you for different things, mining yield calculators and more. Well…

Sorry to be flippant but when somebody makes their argument based on their experience with “ChatGPT” I automatically assume their opinion is completely unqualified. ChatGPT is not a model, and your comment gives no indication of when this happened. Whether it happened last week or last year makes a big difference. As does how ChatGPT wraps the LLM and how you interact with it.
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