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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

It's not exactly difficult to come up with a question that's so unusual the chance of it being in the training set is effectively zero.

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And as any programmer will tell you: they immediately devolve into "hallucinating" answers, not trying to actually reason about the world. Because that's what they do: they create statistically plausible answers even if those answers are complete nonsense.

Can you provide some examples of these genuinely unique questions?

I'm not sure what you mean by "genuinely." But in the coding context LLMs answer novel questions all the time. My codebase uses components and follows patterns that an LLM will have seen before, but the actual codebase is unique. Yet, the LLM can provide detailed explanations about how it works, what bugs or vulnerabilities it might have, modify it, or add features to it.

It must not have existed prior in any text database whatsoever.

It certainly wasn't. The codebase is thousands of lines of bespoke code that I just wrote.

Which pretty much every line in it was written similarly somewhere else before, including an explanation and is somehow included in the massive data set it was trained on.

So far i have asked the AI some novel questions and it came up with novel answers full of hallucinated nonsense, since it copied some similarly named setting or library function and replaced a part of it's name with something i was looking for.

And this training data somehow includes an explanation of how these individual lines (with variable names unique to my application) work together in my unique combination to produce a very specific result? I don't buy it.

And...

> pretty much

Is it "pretty much" or "all"? The claim that the LLM simply has simply memorized all of its responses seems to require "all."

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