3 ms·
There are a number of reasons why LLMs are "unreliable" (prone to hallucination and bullshitting, as well as just being stochastic). I think the core issue is
by HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
There are a number of reasons why LLMs are "unreliable" (prone to hallucination and bullshitting, as well as just being stochastic).
I think the core issue is perhaps that they don't have any personal experience, nor know the trustworthiness or core competencies of their sources. Their training material is just an undifferentiated mass of text - some might be the writings of Richard Feynman, some the writing of someone on 4chan.
Us humans know the value of personal experience and expertise. If we have seen or done something ourselves, applying our own learned skepticism and knowledge, then we treat that as much more trustworthy than something posted on 4chan. If we read something in a book by a well known expert, or hear it from an acquaintance we have learned to trust, then we also treat that as likely to be true, although perhaps still not as much as if we've seen/tried it for ourselves (for which there is little substitute, since only then can we experimentally test any surrounding assumptions for the transmitted knowledge to put it in context).
- sulam 3y agoYou're anthropomorphizing way too much here. All LLMs are is a somewhat more mature Markov chain. There is no persistent intelligence in there that is simply lacking experience. The only "change" you see from run to run is what context you provide it.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoI understand what a transformer is, but even without architectural changes they could probably utilize source-trustworthiness (if it was provided during training) to give better responses. During training they would learn that trusted sources help better predict factual answers where that is called for (i.e. in context of a WikiPedia page). Personal experience would require architectural changes, not least online learning. No need to anthropomorphize - our brain is also just a machine, and we can use it as inspiration for what is missing to build more intelligent systems.
- bingbingbing777 3y agoSo for LLMs to be more trustworthy... they can just link to a Wikipedia page. The power of AI!
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoSo Siri is intelligent after all! "Here's some information on that" (links to WikiPedia page)