LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This
arxiv.org
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As Large Language Models become more ubiquitous across domains, it becomes important to examine their inherent limitations critically. This work argues that hallucinations in language models are not just occasional errors but an inevitable feature of these systems. We demonstrate that hallucinations stem from the fundamental mathematical and logical structure of LLMs. It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms. Our analysis draws on computational theory and Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which references the undecidability of problems like the Halting, Emptiness, and Acceptance Problems. We demonstrate that every stage of the LLM process-from training data compilation to fact retrieval, intent classification, and text generation-will have a non-zero probability of producing hallucinations. This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.
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11d

If humans are neural networks yet humans know when they don’t know and ai is also a neural network can’t they also have the ability to know when they are wrong? Maybe not llms specifically but there must be an ai system that could be made that knows when it is wrong.

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13h

Imagine this: the simple solar-powered calculator in a ruler and your PC are both computers. That’s why your comparison makes no sense.

And yes, it could. But i don’t think it needs neurons to work.

Edit: sorry, this sounds a lot more stern than intended.

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17h

Yeah of course humans are waay smarter and have way more neurons than llm’s but yeah my point was that it could work in theory. I guess not with large language models though.

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