Sure, Joe Average who's using it to look smart in Reddit or HN arguments or to find out how to install a mod for their favorite game isn't gonna notice anymore, because it's much more plausible much more often than two years ago, but if you're asking it things that aren't trivially easy for you to verify, you have no way of telling how frequently it hallucinates.
It appears to me like a form of decoherence and very hard to predict when things break down.
People tend to know when they are guessing. LLMs don't.
This is one I got today:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6889605f-58f8-8011-910b-300209a521...
(image I uploaded: http://img.nrk.no/img/534001.jpeg)
The correct answer would have been Skarpenords Bastion/kruttårn.
I haven't spent any money with claude on this project and realistically it's not worth it, but I've run into little things like that a fair amount.
-LLM devcos
Jokes aside, get deep into the domains you know. Or ask to give movie titles based on specific parts of uncommon films. And definitely ask for instructions using specific software tools (“no actually Opus/o3/2.5, that menu isn’t available in this context” etc.).
A couple of non-programming examples: https://www.evidentlyai.com/blog/llm-hallucination-examples
For example, today I was asking a LLM about how to configure a GH action to install a SDK version that was just recently out of support. It kept hallucinating on my config saying that when you provide multiple SDK versions in the config, it only picks the most recent. This is false. It's also mentioned in the documentation specifically, which I linked the LLM, that it installs all versions you list. Explaining this to copilot, it keeps doubling down, ignoring the docs, and even going as far as asking me to have the action output the installed SDKs, seeing all the ones I requested as installed, then gaslighting me saying that it can print out the wrong SDKs with a `--list-sdks` command.
Up next - ChatGPT does jumping off high buildings kill you?
>>No jumping off high buildings is perfectly safe as long as you land skillfully.
Not really, because no matter how you spin it, the person in your scenario dies.
However, doing Steve Jobs’ diet might actually be fine (or at least not deadly) for an average person. Only as long as they don’t have late-stage pancreatic cancer and don’t decide to forego chemotherapy treatment.
Which is what killed Jobs, not the diet. For all we know, he might’ve been alive today even if he followed the same diet, as long as he also did the chemo treatment.
Ackshually, this seems analogous to Job's diet and refusal of cancer treatment! And it was the cancer that put him at the top of the building in the first place.
What most people call “non-deterministic” in AI is that one of those inputs is a _seed_ that is sourced from a PRNG because getting a different answer every time is considered a feature for most use cases.
Edit: I’m trying to imagine how you could get a non-deterministic AI and I’m struggling because the entire thing is built on a series of deterministic steps. The only way you can make it look non-deterministic is to hide part of the input from the user.
Unless something has fundamentally changed since then (which I've not heard about) all sparse models are only deterministic at the batch level, rather than the sample level.
Depends on the machine that implements the algorithm. For example, it’s possible to make ALUs such that 1+1=2 most of the time, but not all the time.
…
Just ask Intel. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)