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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

>>> I'm not anthropomorphizing anything ...

Yes you are, regarding LLMs at least. Here's why:

  just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to ...
  [be] capable of understanding if it's gone off on
  a hallucinatory path ...

"Smart" in this context is a subjective value judgement. "Hallucinations" are only experienced by living organisms.

You then went on to state:

> If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.

Again, "hallucinating" is not something an algorithm can do. Also, determining factuality is again subjective based on the person assessing the information.

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You ever heard of something called a metaphor, guy? I use the word "smart" as shorthand to describe something that scores highly in a number of coding and terminal use benchmarks (as compared to, let's say, a 30B size model from one and a half years ago.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models

You will note that in my original comment I very specifically said "deepseek v4 flash 0731", which by many benchmarks/metrics, is "smarter" (again, this is a metaphor) than a smaller or older model. It is also specifically known to be relatively capable of producing code and formulas on demand in several common languages.

And "hallucinating" to mean "outputs plausible sounding gibberish that doesn't hold together consistently". Of course there's no actual hallucination going on.

> You ever heard of something called a metaphor, guy?

In this media (comments in HN threads), all I can do is interpret what people write. ;-)

> And "hallucinating" to mean "outputs plausible sounding gibberish that doesn't hold together consistently". Of course there's no actual hallucination going on.

This may very well be what you know to be true and I have no reason nor desire to assume otherwise. The problem is... Many people use the word "hallucinating" in this context literally and not metaphorically.

Since I do not know you, how am I to tell the difference?

You have 'logic' in your name. You would be well aware of the physical Church Turing statement and as of yet it has held up. Everything, including our brain, as we currently know, is an algorithm.

To be fair, they also have “adieu” (farewell) to logic.

> To be fair, they also have “adieu” (farewell) to logic.

It is always a joy when a person, such as yourself, finds the irony in my moniker.

Thank you for this.

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