[HN Gopher] Experts starting to doubt AI 'hallucinations' will g...
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Experts starting to doubt AI 'hallucinations' will go away: 'This
isn't fixable'
Author : cratermoon
Score : 13 points
Date : 2023-08-02 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| mindcrime wrote:
| Of course they _can_ be fixed. To say otherwise is nonsense. The
| questions are:
|
| 1. How to do it? My thought is the answer involves building AI's
| that are much more than just LLM's. You need a system that has
| _knowledge_ and a world model and common-sense reasoning, etc.
| When you 're doing nothing but "predict the next token based on
| statistical patterns" then yeah, you're going to get
| hallucinations.*
|
| 2. How much will it cost?
|
| 3. How long will it take?
|
| And so on.
|
| * Let me add that that's a very "off the cuff" view of my current
| thinking on building AI's that are less susceptible to
| "hallucinations" (or "confabulations" if you prefer). But I'm not
| saying that is the _only_ way, or that it will ever be possible
| to construct AI 's that _never_ make mistakes at all. After all,
| our current "gold standard" for intelligence to compare with
| (eg, human intelligence) is quite prone to making mistakes. So
| I'm only talking about getting to a level that eliminates the
| really egregious hallucofabulations (to coin a word).
| cratermoon wrote:
| > building AI's that are much more than just LLM
|
| Well, yes, by taking AI to mean something different than the
| current meaning. Of course if you build something that's not an
| LLM you may find a way to fix the confabulation* problem, but
| that isn't fixing what we have now.
|
| The history of 'AI' the term is one of continually redefining
| it to mean something different, as the winds of technology and
| business blow. In this case, the assertion is that, under what
| we currently call 'AI', there's not a fix.
|
| * I prefer the term confabulation over hallucination. See
| <https://universeodon.com/@siderea/109883198218504351>
| mindcrime wrote:
| Well, I agree with your general sentiment to a point, but I
| would say that in the lexicon of the day, "AI" and "LLM" are
| not synonymous. LLM's are one (current very popular and
| useful) approach to AI, but only a VERY casual observer would
| conflate the two terms as being completely equivalent. To me,
| it goes without saying that the world of AI is bigger than
| just LLM's.
|
| But since we're talking about an article in Fortune, maybe
| it's fair to think of this strictly from a lay-person
| perspective.
|
| Also, to the extent that it matters, I'm not _necessarily_
| saying "build something (completely) different than an LLM".
| I can picture a world with systems that include LLM's that
| interoperate with other components that do more of the "world
| model" and "commonsense reasoning" parts, yielding an
| aggregate system that does more/better than any of the parts
| could do in isolation.
| cratermoon wrote:
| No argument from me. I see good uses for LLMs, both now,
| with care, and as part of a toolkit for building towards
| more general intelligence.
|
| One way to think of LLMs as available now is as sort of
| thinking partner, much like bouncing ideas off another
| person, except LLMs use the ideas of entire communities of
| persons. Of course some of the ideas bounced back at you
| from thousands or millions of people are going to get
| things wrong. Don't be like the lawyers who blindly used
| ChatGPT to write their legal briefs without even checking
| the citations, and you'll be OK.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| When people say that something can't be done, I think the
| majority of the time they mean (but don't say) that it can't be
| done _within unspecified x,y,z constraints_.
|
| Those constraints, as you eluded to, are most often things like
| "within a certain timeframe" or "under a certain cost".
|
| Saying that something cannot be done without specifying those
| unspoken constraints - or being explicit that you do actually
| mean it can't be done, _even on an infinite timescale or with
| infinite money_ - is kind of a useless statement to make IMHO.
|
| I've never really understood that tendency but maybe working in
| tech kind of conditions you to think in a more flexible way
| about what may be possible?
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| They're not going to go away for the same reason that the social
| media companies are so hesitant to openly report on the number of
| bots on their platform. For the same reason that Tesla still
| calls their assisted driving "AutoPilot": They make too much
| money on the suckers.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Isn't an AI "hallucination" just the equivalent of going down a
| wrong path due to closely related or incomplete information in
| the LLM? I thought that it was possible to "tune" the LLM when
| this happens?
|
| Maybe "one-size-fits-all" solutions won't be fixed; but it seems
| that domain-specific systems should be easily tailored.
|
| https://gptea.beehiiv.com/p/ai-hallucinations-explained
| onesphere wrote:
| Studying text doesn't expose you to reality as much as
| experiencing with all the senses.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I think that's right. Most likely general AI will be some
| fractal type system where the larger models first outline the
| boundaries then smaller models refine the pathways.
|
| I'd say 2-3 years the money proposition will be a market of
| small, efficient models with clear domain bias and you build
| out by overlapping the domains till you cover the footprint.
|
| These large models just interconnect too much to efficiently
| produce reliable output unless you don't care about
| accuracy(eg, art or far right propaganda)
| throwaway849755 wrote:
| I believe a more accurate term would be _AI confabulation._
|
| When one confabulates, one shamelessly inserts words which sound
| smooth and grammatical and potentially acceptable to a listener
| (and the speaker), but shamelessly with no hesitation or
| corrections to achieve actual truth.
|
| I suspect there needs to be some layering on of reflection and
| inhibition to avoid this.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yes, 100% agree. See
| <https://universeodon.com/@siderea/109883198218504351> for some
| thoughts. I think we're stuck with the term 'hallucination' in
| most usage, if for no other reason than cognitive sloth.
| cc101 wrote:
| This issue goes away if one accept that LLM projects produce
| opinions not facts. IMHO LLM responses resemble our own initial
| opinions about an issue. Our initial opinions are often flawed
| and require review. I wouldn't be surprised if there is actually
| a deep equivalence between LLM processes and the sub-conscious
| processes from which we form our opinions.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Humans cannot 'fix' other humans' hallucinating, embellishing, or
| outright lying so why would we think we could 'fix' that in a
| system designed by, and operated by, humans?
| more_corn wrote:
| It's not fixable inside the LLM. It's 110% fixable.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| A meta point as someone who has been working in mathematical
| signal processing and ML professionally for a while -- at the
| time of writing, every single comment in this thread displayed a
| serious (yet unique!) misconception about AI, either as it works
| today or in general. I understand why it's gotten so buzzy in
| popular discourse, but it's sadly all but ruined discussion on
| social media (including HN).
|
| Are there any good, maybe more gatekept forums for discussing AI
| news? It is great to have a community to discuss with, the field
| is so large and moving so fast, and there's so much to learn from
| other practitioners, but the SNR here (where i often find news)
| has just gotten so low.
| mindcrime wrote:
| As someone who also works professionally in this field, I'd be
| curious to know what you find problematic about my comment.
| I'll grant you that I may be over-simplifying a bit, but it
| seems appropriate in the context at hand.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Actually you're right, that was my mistake. Current-gen
| autoregressive token predictor "hallucinations" probably
| can't be fixed, but yeah, the way forward will involve new
| architectures and I would place my bets that something like
| world models will be involved to ground generative output.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Ah OK. You had me scared there for a minute. :-)
| erulabs wrote:
| Why not use your experience and expertise to join the
| conversations and offer corrections to the misunderstanding?
|
| From my perspective, this is easily the lowest SNR comment on
| this post.
| gochi wrote:
| That's not how public forums work. Unless you are put on a
| pedestal (which is effectively what writing your own
| articles, joining larger organizations, making your own
| content, etc does), you will be drowned out by
| misunderstandings and misinformation.
|
| There will always be a much greater effort required tackling
| bad information than it takes to post that bad information.
| This is why public forums are a terrible place for debates or
| discussions. It's also why you're considering their post a
| lower SNR when it's really not, certainly not in comparison
| to those just claiming that it's possible with a sort of
| blind optimism or ranting about bots or what have you.
| Important to signify here, I don't lean in any which
| direction on this specific topic, but just highlighting how
| the low effort posts being viewed as higher SNR to you is
| exactly what leads to more noise on public forums.
|
| Early bird gets the worm, and all that fun jazz!
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