> LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% remember grabbing at what they think is the most likely correct

> LLM "hallucinations" are more akin to a student looking at a test over material they only 70% remember grabbing at what they think is the most likely correct answer. AKA. extrapolation. AKA. what everyone is doing to a lesser or greater degree, when consequences of stopping are worse than of getting this wrong. That's not just the case of school, where giving up because you "don't know" is guaranteed F, while extrapolating has a non-zero chance of scoring you anything between F and A. It's also the case in everyday life, where you do things incrementally - getting the wrong answer is a stepping stone to getting a less wrong answer in the next attempt. We do that at every scale - from inner thought process all the way to large-scale engineering. Hardly anyone learns 100% of the material, because that's just plain memorization. We're always extrapolating from incomplete information; more studying and more experience (and more smarts) just makes us more likely to get it right. > It's not "inventive" to assume one math library will have the same functions as another, it's just losing sight of specific details. Depends. To a large extent, this kind of "hallucinations" is what a good programmer is supposed to be doing. That is, code to the API you'd like to have, inventing functions and classes convenient to you if they don't exist, and then see how to make this work - which, in one place, means fixing your own call sites, and in another, building utilities or a whole compat layer between your code and the actual API.