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Tim Cook is 'not 100 percent' sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations
- karaterobot 2y ago> Cook said he would “never claim” that its new Apple Intelligence system won’t generate false or misleading information with 100 percent confidence. Well yeah, no shit, that's the technology they're using. Imagining making the opposite claim: that their system will never suffer from the inherent limitations of the underlying technology. The article even has a short paragraph mentioning that literally nobody else can make any stronger claims than this, yet it's presented as a headline-worthy statement.
- gdcbe 2y agoWhy do people talk about hallucinations? Pretty deceptive word of you ask me. Not an expert though, but isn’t that behaviour inherent to how it works? Bit of a misnomer and giving people the wrong idea of what is going on here.
- jldugger 2y agoBecause "fabrication" seems worse, if more accurate.
- firejake308 2y agoI prefer "confabulation," which describes the analogous human behavior where you have no idea what the objective truth actually is, so you just make up something that sounds right
- ein0p 2y agoFabrication implies malicious intent or at least intentional deception. LLMs don’t have any “intent”.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jedbrown 2y agoTheir developers have intent. That intent is to give the perception of understanding/facts/logic without designing representations of such a thing, and with full knowledge that as a result, it will be routinely wrong in ways that would convey malicious intent if a human did it. I would say they are trained to deceive because if being correct was important, the developers would have taken an entirely different approach.
- wumbo 2y agogenerating information without regard to the truth is bullshitting, not necessarily malicious intent. for example, this is bullshit because it’s words with no real thought behind it: “if being correct was important, the developers would have taken an entirely different approach”
- jedbrown 2y agoIf you are asking a professional high-stakes questions about their expertise in a work context and they are just bullshitting you, it's fair to impugn their motives. Similarly if someone is using their considerable talent to place bullshit artists in positions of liability-free high-stakes decisions. Your second comment is more flippant than mine, as even AI boosters like Chollet and LeCun have come around to LLMs being tangential to delivering on their dreams, and that's before engaging with formal methods, V&V, and other approaches used in systems that actually value reliability.
- nicce 2y agoIn reality, it should sound worse so people don’t trust it so much. But those who sell AI products don’t want that.
- wumbo 2y agoIsn’t hallucinating inherent to biological brains too? It’s normal in small degrees even for mentally healthy individuals.
- kristiandupont 2y agoIt's obviously an analogy, but it seems pretty fitting to me? What would you call it?
- TillE 2y agoMaking errors, generating nonsense, being wrong. It's a catchy term but it's not accurate in any meaningful way.
- seadan83 2y agoHallucinating has the implication of being wrong. The word further adds the context of being elaborately wrong. That feels pretty accurate to describe an AI going into detail when it is wrong.
- x3n0ph3n3 2y agoThat's the accepted word to describe it making up bullshit instead of regurgitating existing information.
- mariopt 2y agoHallucinations reduce the success rate of AI workflows, which must be taken seriously. Imagine a workflow with 8 steps where each step/agent has a 95% success rate, the success rate of this workflow is only (1-0.05)^8 = 0.66 ~= 66%. Not bad but not enough to replace humans yet (unless 66% makes you profitable). The hallucinations/errors compound and can misguide decisions if you rely too much on AI.
- realusername 2y agoNot enough to replace humans in most critical tasks, but enough to replace Google, that's for sure. My own success rate to find information on Google these days is around 50% by query at best.
- phaedryx 2y agoWhat would you call it when AI doesn't have the answer so it makes stuff up (sometimes in a dangerous way)?
- jamil7 2y agoBullshitting
- elevaet 2y agoThat's called bullshit.
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y agoConfabulating if you want a non-"vulgar" word. Bulshitting if you don't care.
- ein0p 2y agoSounds like he’s pretty well informed then. That’s good. 0% error rate is unrealistic in AI models, humans must curate.
- moffkalast 2y agoA 0% error rate is unrealistic in humans as well. Impossible really.
- azinman2 2y agoBut the mistakes made will be different, and historically you’d have a source to consider. Here there is just one global source telling you to add glue to your pizza to make the cheese stick.
- ein0p 2y agoThere are models that can provide references if you’d like
- malfist 2y agoAnd they'll happily make up those references as well
- ein0p 2y agoNope, that’s not how it works. Those references aren’t generated in such systems, they are retrieved. They might not provide references to all the sources, of course, same as humans.
- azinman2 2y agoExactly. Right now if I google something (ai overview aside), I’m linked to a source. That source may or may not include its sources, but its provenance tells me a lot. If I’m reading info linked off Mayo Clinic, their reputation compels the information to be judged of high quality. If they start putting in a bunch of garbage, their reputation gets shot and will cause me to look elsewhere. With LLMs there is no such choice, and it will spew everything from high to low quality (to dangerously wrong) info.
- __loam 2y agoOf course not. Hallucinations are the only things these models can produce, they have no mechanism to tell if what they're writing is a fact or not. They generate bullshit in the "on bullshit" by Frankfurt sense of the word.
- ein0p 2y agoNeither do humans. You write what you believe. It is intractable for you to confirm every fact you believe in
- __loam 2y ago[flagged]
- recursive 2y agoNo one is claiming LLMs "believe" things. Well, maybe someone is.
- seadan83 2y ago> It is intractable for you to confirm every fact you believe A 'fact' that is not confirmed is an opinion. A 'opinion' sincerely held to be true without data is called faith. I do think humans are quite bad at recognizing that most of what they think they know is opinion, and/or the 'facts' are often based on personal experience (which is by definition a cherry-picked data set), and thus is also an opinion too. I think as well that those that practice science extensively are more practiced to really identify what is fact vs unsupported opinion. Without that practice, it's a lot easier IMO to then think a person knows a lot more facts than they really do. Which is to say, humans generally know very little, and it's not terribly comfortable to acknowledge and feel that way. Which, leads us to the ultimate reality. Most of what a lay person has to say would be opinion, it's not really worth much - and it's even worse when data no longer matters.
- jwagenet 2y ago> Cook responded, “We’re integrating with other people as well.” […] Apple could eventually bring Google Gemini to iOS, too. It might be more expensive, but perhaps Apple is uniquely positioned to synthesize/compare answers from multiple models to provide more accurate results.
- stevarino 2y agoThat sounds like it would create resolvable dichotomies and other problems. As Segal's law states: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
- jwagenet 2y agoThis is a fair concern, but I’m not convinced this is a fundamentally different problem than sensor fusion in autonomous vehicles.
- w10-1 2y agoTim Cook spent decades protecting both IP and profit by pitting vendors against each other. He's avoided being captive to China, and Apple will not let AI capture its business.
- _thisdot 2y agoIs anyone expecting anything more at this point? Maybe it’ll improve over time. But expecting Apple’s implementation of ChatGPT to be better than ChatGPT is unrealistic
- jedberg 2y agoOf course not. Humans "hallucinate" all the time too. Why do we hold AI to a higher standard than humans? It's the same with self driving cars. "Oh it had one accident, must not be safe!" and yet humans have 100s of accidents a day. The main problem here is expectations -- everyone expects the machine to be perfect, and when it's not, it breaks expectations. In the past, machines were generally a lot more accurate, they just didn't do a lot of stuff. Now they they can do a lot more stuff, their accuracy is coming down to human levels, and it throws everyone off. I don't think we need to fix hallucinations, we need to fix expectations. Humans don't have 100% perfect recall of every fact they've ever learned, why do we expect AI to?
- ceejayoz 2y agoWe generally send halllucinating humans to the hospital.
- jedberg 2y agoYou must be kidding. Every day my spouse and I have a conversation that involves one of us realizing that we've mis-remembered something. Not getting every fact correct is super-common in humans. This right here is a perfect example of the problem of expectations. Do you have 100% accurate recall of every fact you've ever learned?
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- munk-a 2y agoA pretty accurate statement - and this, I think, is the realization most likely to kill a lot of consumer AI features. There's a large liability factor that I don't think we'll ever get over.
- superbaconman 2y agoWithin the context of building AI systems: What's the distinction between hallucinating, imagining, and inferring?
- gafferongames 2y agoIn other news, I'm 'not 100 percent' sure I can solve the halting problem.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoSome useless fun about the halting problem is that it only works in a mathematical sense, because all real-world programs halt if given enough time. The heat death of the universe comes for us all in the end.
- consumer451 2y agoI've been wondering lately, what kind of product world would we be living in if LLMs got to, say, 99% hallucination-free? Would it be the same world that some CEOs seem to think that we live in now? Would it really become the job the killer that is feared, at just two nines?
- sova 2y agoProbabalistic Computing is amazing 100% of the time give or take like 10%
- SavageBeast 2y agoI know plenty of actual humans who speak with apparent authority and experience on all variety of things they know nothing about. Current AI has copied an existing human behavior if anything.
- nobutterbetter 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seba_dos1 2y agoI am 100 percent sure it can't.
- ednalewislives 2y agoGell-Mann Amnesia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichton&diffonly=true#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto... It's Gell-Mann Amnesia by another name. I'm impressed with ChatGPT et al right until I query something I know a lot about, and it then proceeds to "hallucinate" far worse than any journalist or newspaper. It makes me question if every other piece of information it's given me is factual. It is the biggest "elephant in the room" and if/until it's corrected, every single one of these companies is on a trajectory towards worthlessness. It is a much bigger problem than "People make mistakes too."