3 ms·

The issue of hallucinations is overblown. I use GPT4 all the time and don't see any hallucinations at all. It's a big problem with Google BARD and GPT3 and earl

The issue of hallucinations is overblown. I use GPT4 all the time and don't see any hallucinations at all. It's a big problem with Google BARD and GPT3 and earlier models. But GPT4 fixed the issue of hallucinations completely.

danlugo92 3y ago
You shouldn't call it overblown given GPT4 was released not even a month ago, but if it's fixed now then great.
tjr 3y ago
I wonder if it's "fixed" or if it's just less obvious. It seems that an LLM would "hallucinate" a bogus answer if it didn't actually have a good answer somewhere in its training. Is GPT4 so much more trained that it rarely encounters something it doesn't have a reasonable answer for? In which case, it would still "hallucinate" if cornered on some more obscure matter? I mean, like, what would it mean to actually solve the problem? I would not expect any computer system to know the answer to literally everything, so the fix is not to train it more, but rather, for it to realize and acknowledge if it doesn't have enough data to give a good answer, and tell you that rather than make something up. Does GPT4 do that? (I have yet to use GPT4 myself.)
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  In my experience, GPT-4 is equally willing to make things up if it doesn't know something but it has so much more knowledge than GPT-3.5 that this happens less often in practice.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    On that note, I’ve found that just including in the prompt a request for GPT4 to consider its confidence level in an answer and inform me of that confidence level, to reconsider its answer if its confidence is low, and that accuracy is critically important for the topic of the conversation, also can result in better steering it. I mean, kind of works with humans too. In a high pressure work or school environment, people can confabulate the answers someone wants to hear to avoid discomfort “oh yes, we did the training exercise, the trucks and tanks are in great shape.” Sometimes people need to know they can admit they are wrong. I wonder if some aspect of current LLM tuning/training could be modified so LLMs are more “comfortable”, for lack of a non-anthropomorphized term coming to mind, with admitting they are unsure.
    - ukuina 3y ago
      When I tried this, it made up random, non-repeatable confidence values that had little bearing to the veracity of its statements.
      - sebzim4500 3y ago
        If you read the GPT-4 paper, they claim that the base model was well calibrated but the calibration was completely broken by RLHF
sebzim4500 3y ago
GPT-4 hallucinates significantly less than those other models but it is going way too far to say that it has fixed the issue completely. In my experience, it probably hallucinates about 3x less than GPT 3.5. I use GPT-4 a lot but really only for code generation and answering questions about documentation. I'm not including cases where it gives answers that are out of date as hallucations, I consider that an entirely separate failure mode.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Oh, GPT-4 does hallucinate. It's more subtle than with GPT-3.5, but it's there. Most of the time I had it happen, it could either correct itself, or counter-hallucinated (with further corrections oscillating) - the latter is quite easy to spot. It's not a big deal in practice, though, as long as you remember to take a probabilistic approach. GPT-4 is not an oracle, it's a 4 year old savant, that tries its best, but has attention span of a hamster, and likes to extrapolate instead of saying "I don't know". In domains you have at least minimal experience in (e.g. you can program, but not in the language/framework you're asking about), it's relatively easy to verify things by common sense and/or by paying attention to the conversation - if the follow-up message seems to contradict the previous one, it's likely at least one of them involves a hallucination. Etc. The overall feel I get for GPT-4, at least in terms of code, is that its hallucinations tend to mostly be of the "I don't know for sure, but seems logical that..." kind. A real example from earlier today: I asked GPT-4 to refactor some code C++ that contained function calls like InitializeSomething(), AddWidget(), etc. It decided to put all those calls into RAII objects, and hallucinated the existence of corresponding function DeinitializeSomething(), RemoveWidget(), etc. I kind of understand why it did that - it feels only logical that such functions exist too.
loandbehold 3y ago
In most cases it does acknowledge that it doesn't know.

danlugo92 3y ago

You shouldn't call it overblown given GPT4 was released not even a month ago, but if it's fixed now then great.

tjr 3y ago

I wonder if it's "fixed" or if it's just less obvious. It seems that an LLM would "hallucinate" a bogus answer if it didn't actually have a good answer somewhere in its training. Is GPT4 so much more trained that it rarely encounters something it doesn't have a reasonable answer for? In which case, it would still "hallucinate" if cornered on some more obscure matter? I mean, like, what would it mean to actually solve the problem? I would not expect any computer system to know the answer to literally everything, so the fix is not to train it more, but rather, for it to realize and acknowledge if it doesn't have enough data to give a good answer, and tell you that rather than make something up. Does GPT4 do that? (I have yet to use GPT4 myself.)

sebzim4500 3y ago
In my experience, GPT-4 is equally willing to make things up if it doesn't know something but it has so much more knowledge than GPT-3.5 that this happens less often in practice.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  On that note, I’ve found that just including in the prompt a request for GPT4 to consider its confidence level in an answer and inform me of that confidence level, to reconsider its answer if its confidence is low, and that accuracy is critically important for the topic of the conversation, also can result in better steering it. I mean, kind of works with humans too. In a high pressure work or school environment, people can confabulate the answers someone wants to hear to avoid discomfort “oh yes, we did the training exercise, the trucks and tanks are in great shape.” Sometimes people need to know they can admit they are wrong. I wonder if some aspect of current LLM tuning/training could be modified so LLMs are more “comfortable”, for lack of a non-anthropomorphized term coming to mind, with admitting they are unsure.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    When I tried this, it made up random, non-repeatable confidence values that had little bearing to the veracity of its statements.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      If you read the GPT-4 paper, they claim that the base model was well calibrated but the calibration was completely broken by RLHF

sebzim4500 3y ago

GPT-4 hallucinates significantly less than those other models but it is going way too far to say that it has fixed the issue completely. In my experience, it probably hallucinates about 3x less than GPT 3.5. I use GPT-4 a lot but really only for code generation and answering questions about documentation. I'm not including cases where it gives answers that are out of date as hallucations, I consider that an entirely separate failure mode.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Oh, GPT-4 does hallucinate. It's more subtle than with GPT-3.5, but it's there. Most of the time I had it happen, it could either correct itself, or counter-hallucinated (with further corrections oscillating) - the latter is quite easy to spot. It's not a big deal in practice, though, as long as you remember to take a probabilistic approach. GPT-4 is not an oracle, it's a 4 year old savant, that tries its best, but has attention span of a hamster, and likes to extrapolate instead of saying "I don't know". In domains you have at least minimal experience in (e.g. you can program, but not in the language/framework you're asking about), it's relatively easy to verify things by common sense and/or by paying attention to the conversation - if the follow-up message seems to contradict the previous one, it's likely at least one of them involves a hallucination. Etc. The overall feel I get for GPT-4, at least in terms of code, is that its hallucinations tend to mostly be of the "I don't know for sure, but seems logical that..." kind. A real example from earlier today: I asked GPT-4 to refactor some code C++ that contained function calls like InitializeSomething(), AddWidget(), etc. It decided to put all those calls into RAII objects, and hallucinated the existence of corresponding function DeinitializeSomething(), RemoveWidget(), etc. I kind of understand why it did that - it feels only logical that such functions exist too.

loandbehold 3y ago

In most cases it does acknowledge that it doesn't know.