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Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of this has to do with the post-training these models normally get. They are designed to answer basic questions with straightforward and short summary answers. They have the capacity to reason deeply, but they are not biased towards that unless prompted. I think it's because LLMs as they are in 2026 are both highly capable but also parlor tricks. They are not sentient, you just set them up with the context and then they roll downhill. You could reach a genuinely novel answer, but only with the right input. They have no will and depend on human guidance. They are both a marvel and a machine.

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Something I've noticed is that if you run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (Q8) with a low temperature of 0.4, and leave default reasoning turned on, it will spend quite a lot of time in reasoning/thinking mode. But often it does figure out how to solve something on its own by correcting itself within its reasoning loop before it outputs the final 'answer'.

If you watch the progress of the reasoning in llama-server while it's doing the thinking, you can track its progress. Sometimes the dead ends it goes down or things that it considers and then disregards are themselves something useful to re-prompt it with later, and send it 'rolling downhill', to use the metaphor of another commenter here, in another direction towards the same effort.

Putting 3.6 35B-A3B into a state that lets it spend a lot of time in its reasoning mode before outputting an answer is probably not something that a web based SaaS LLM would tolerate, because it would frustrate many of the non technical end users who want a LLM to spit out an answer now.

You'd have less problems with 27B, btw.

I didn't mean so much that it was a problem, but actually in some projects for exploring what's possible, watching its "thinking" mode output at temp 0.4 is intentional and useful to take notes and begin exploring new directions. Sometimes it'll come up with something I hadn't thought of, perhaps it will go down that direction, perhaps it'll disregard it...

'roll down hill' is a good way of putting it. They don't have 'will', but that's as we want it I think. I think alignment is harder if they develop will. Without will they are still tools that feel like an exoskeleton rather than something that will control us.

Agents have a state which will unfold as a plan, especially in planning mode. Why not call this 'will'?

I think because without the initial prompt, they are only interpreting our will, and do not act under their own volition.

Even Fable hallucinates. I had it tracking down some very obscure Ancient Greek inscriptions and the response just made up a translation/context for one inscription after "looking it up." Now, it was still a very particular thing and I really had to get into the weeds to push it to that point, but who knows how many other gaps, near or far, it will happily skip over just for the sake of coherence. I think this is an issue more primarily with LLMs than sensory systems like Waymos or all the ML applied to industrial processes--that really only requires pattern recognition, often very impressive and subtle pattern recognition but its no different from an artist learning to tell the difference between Prussian blue and Navy blue or a Sommelier learning the fine distinctions between various regions of Bordeaux. Language has many more avenues and introduces inherent contradictions that do not always lend themselves to easy resolution. But there are no alternatives paths visible to the models, there is only ever the next word; stochastic, in the sense that the possibility space is open; deterministic, in the sense that the final response is always a necessary result of every token that came before it in their total sequence. Thus, any response is constantly in the work of erasing any possible alternative, slowly narrowing down what can be written. If contradictions in language necessarily involve interpretation, then the models will only ever choose one at a time, and for them, it will always be the right one. But anyone who understands the subtleties of language can tell you that when it comes to determining the truth of an indeterminate statement, there is never just one right answer; or, rather, the answer which is taken to be the "right" one depends on the possibility of its own reversal into falsehood, if any argument has to be made to justify it.

>Even Fable hallucinates

It’s in the name :)

Hallucination is fundamental to how LLMs work, and is mostly unrelated to how large or smart they are.

Everything that an LLM outputs is just a statistical language-based (no real grounding) prediction. Luckily with a model based on a large training set most common questions may elicit coherent responses from the training data, but you don't need to veer too far off into "questions less asked" territory to get responses based on training data mashups that amount to best guesses that are wrong, aka hallucinations. The unfortunate part of this is that as a user you may only catch this when asking a question about something you are already fairly knowledgeable about, then you give some pushback to the model and it cheerfully acknowledges "you're right - I made that up".

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