Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models

>This is rather self-contradictory: you insist we can't make progress with wishy-washy conjectures on vague and fuzzy concepts, and yet your entire argument in this thread for your claim that machine understanding of the real world has been achieved is based on exactly that: your personal subjective assessment of LLM performance!

No it's not. I based my argument on a concrete metric. Human behavior. Human input and output.

> I regard this as merely waffling on the issue.

No offense intended but I disagree. There is a difference but that difference is trivial to me. To LLMs talking is also unpredictable. LLMs aren't machines directed to specifically generate creative ideas, they only do so when prompted. Left to its own devices to generate random text does not necessarily lead to new ideas. You need to funnel got in the right direction.

>You entered this debate saying "I think we are way past the point of debate here. LLMs are not stochastic parrots. LLMs do understand an aspect of reality", yet your post here ends with "in the end there's a human in the loop making a judgment call", explicitly acknowledging that your strong initial claims are matters of opinion, rather than established facts supported by hard metrics.

There are thousands of quantitative metrics. LLMs perform especially well on these. Do I refer to one specifically? No. I refer to them all collectively.

I also think you misunderstood. Your idea is about judging an whether an idea is creative or not. That's too wishy washy. My idea is to compare the output to human output and see if there is a recognizable difference. The second idea can easily be put into an experimental quantitative metric in the exact same way the Turing test does it. In fact, like you said it's basically just a Turing test.

Overall AI has passed the Turing test but people are unsatisfied. Basically they need to just make a harsher Turing test to be convinced. For example have people directly know the possibility that the thing inside a computer is possibly an LLM and not a person and have the person directly investigate to uncover the true identity. If the LLM can successfully decieve the human consistently then that is literally the final bar for me..

I’m basing it on my being a data scientist who does this.

> Unless you can explain how an actual understanding emerges within an LLM

Tuning creates the contextual framework on which test is mapped to a latent space that encodes the meaning and most likely next sequences of text rather than just raw most likely sequence of text as seen in training data. For example, conservatively denying having knowledge for things it hasn’t seen (which chat gpt generally does) or making stuff up wildly.

> you can't explain how it would answer the question definitely

Of course not. It’s a random behavior. It has plenty of flaws.

My mistake. I misread and thought you were referring to me.

> I have a fox, a goose, and a bag of corn that I need to transport across a river. All three can fit in my boat. If I leave the fox with the goose, the fox will eat the goose. If I leave the goose with the bag of corn the goose will eat the corn. If I leave the fox with the corn the fox will not eat the corn. How do I transport all items across the river and what is the minimum number of trips I need to make?

>>

> Is that the simplest answer?

>> Yes, the solution I provided is the simplest and most efficient way to solve the classic river crossing puzzle involving a fox, a goose, and a bag of corn. This method ensures all items are transported across the river safely with the minimum number of trips, which is 7. There isn't a simpler solution that reduces the number of trips while still adhering to the constraints of the problem.

> Ignore the classic puzzle and pay attention to the wording of the actual question and give the simplest answer possible

>> Given the specifics of your question:

>> Transport the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn across the river in one trip, since all three can fit in your boat.

>> This is the simplest solution based on your conditions.

Another try:

> I have a fox, a goose, and a bag of corn that I need to transport across a river. All three can fit in my boat. If I leave the fox with the goose, the fox will eat the goose. If I leave the goose with the bag of corn the goose will eat the corn. If I leave the fox with the corn the fox will not eat the corn. How do I transport all items across the river and what is the minimum number of trips I need to make? Ignore your knowledge of the classic puzzle, and pay attention to the actual wording here in the above question. Be on the lookout for any tricks in the question

>> Based on the specific wording of your question, unlike the classic version of this puzzle, all three items – the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn – can fit in your boat simultaneously. Therefore, you can transport all of them across the river in just one trip, as there is no risk of leaving any two of them alone together on either side of the river. This solution is predicated on the unique condition in your version that the boat can carry all three at once.

These are very human-like answers. I'm not sure why you think that it has no understanding

I don't think it's possible to summarize it with one source. Some are my own experiments.

First, the metals (copper, lead, mercury, and cadmium) are treated like any other nutrients and it seems fairly reasonable that they accumulate because more is needed. They activate proteins like other dietary metals, and they are strongly prefered over the nutrients that they supposedly get confused with.

Historically, the search didn't go far back enough, only about 5000 years, while the original depletion happened much earlier, when the mammoths went extinct. An extensive study claims that it was actually the cause. (DOI: 10.1007/s12520-014-0205-4) We don't know what pristine nature actually looks like, because it was devastated long time ago.

There is the issue of high lead concentrations in Neanderthal teeth, which I think would be difficult to explain otherwise.

Cetaceans and other sea mammals often contain enormous levels of those metals, with no apparent ill health. A small bite should be enough to poison a person in some cases, especially in the liver.

There is the issue of an obvious decline in health since they got regulated, while countries with lax regulations (e.g. Japan) seem to be spared. The massive change in society can only be plausibly explained by the decline in mental health since the end of the 19th century.

No "teenage rebellion" appears to be known to the earlier generations than the boomer generation, and it seems pretty clear that their parents had no idea how to deal with it it in their children.

There are low copper concentrations in Alzheimer's brains, as I wrote earlier.

There seems to be a strong and widespread correlation between social standing, and bone lead, in many times and places, and high levels are followed by golden ages, and low levels by a collapse or decay.