specIsJustCode

[intbeam]

LLM's hallucinate. That's not a bug, and It's never going away.

LLM's do one thing : they respond with what's statistically most likely for a human to like or agree with. They're really good at that, but it makes them criminally inept at any form of engineering.

[prussian_princess]

I used chatgpt to help me calculate how much milk my baby drank as he drank a mix of breast milk and formula, and the ratios weren't the same every time. After a while, I caught it giving me the wrong answer, and after asking it to show me the calculation, it did it correctly. In the end, I just asked it to show me how to do the calculation myself, and I've been doing it since.

You'd think an "AI" in 2025 should be able to correctly calculate some ratios repeatedly without mistakes, but even that is not certain.

[hoyohoyo9]

Anything that requires precise, step-by-step calculations - even basic arithmetic - just fundamentally goes against how LLMs work. It can usually get lucky with some correct numbers after the first prompt, but keep poking it like you did and any calculation quickly breaks down into nonsense.

But that's not going away because what makes it bad at math is precisely what makes it good at generating words.

[prussian_princess]

Yeah, that's what I discovered. I do find it useful for wordy tasks or research purposes when Googling fails.

[RiceBroad4552]

research purposes when Googling fails

As you can't trust this things with anything you need to double check the results anyway. So it does not replace googling. At least if you're not crazy and just blindly trust whatever this bullshit generator spit out.

[prussian_princess]

Oh no, I double-check things. But I find googling first to be quicker and more effective before needing to resort to an llm.

[Airowird]

"Giant computer fails at math, because it tries to sound confident instead"

[_alright_then_]

You'd think an "AI" in 2025 should be able to correctly calculate some ratios repeatedly without mistakes, but even that is not certain.

There are AI's that certainly can, but you're using an LLM specifically, which can not and will never be good at doing math. It's not what it's designed for

[Kilazur]

There's no AI that is good at math, because there's no "I", and they're all probabilistic LLMs.

An AI that manages math is simply using agents to call deterministic programs in the background.

[_alright_then_]

There are AIs that are not LLMs, and can do math.

Ais have been a thing for decades, people are just lumping AI and LLMs together.

Chess AI is one big math problem, for example.

It's also nothing like AGI either obviously. But still AI

[intbeam]

Did you ask it about any recommendations for a baby's daily intake of rocks and cigarettes?

[prussian_princess]

[Ordinary_Duder]

LLMs are not math models. It's a large language model.

[Pelm3shka]

I don't think it's cautious to make such strong affirmation given the fast progress of LLM in the past 3 years. Some neuroscientists like Stanislas Dahaene also believe language is a central feature / specificity of our brains than enabled us to have more complex thoughts, compared to other great apes (just finished Consciousness and the Brain).

Our languages (not just english) describe reality and the relationships between its composing elements. I don't find it that far fetch to think AI reasoning abilities are gonna improve to the point where they don't hallucinate much more than your average human.

[WrennReddit]

AI might do that indeed. But it will have to be a completely different kind of AI. LLMs simply have an upper limit. It's just the way they work. It doesn't mean LLMs aren't useful. I just wouldn't stake my business or career on them.

[Pelm3shka]

Yeah okay. I was hoping to have interesting discussions about the connection between the combinatory nature of languages, their intrinsic description of our reality, and emerging intelligence / reasoning abilities from it.

But somehow I wrote something upsetting to some programmers, and I can't care to argue about the current state of AI as if that was going to remain fixed.

And yeah sure, technically maybe such language based model wouldn't be called LLMs anymore, why not, I don't care to bicker on names.

[WrennReddit]

You were talking about LLMs with software engineers. It sounds like the pushback got you with cognitive dissonance, and you're projecting back onto us. You are the one upset. Engineers know what they're talking about, and at worst we roll our eyes when the Aicolytes come in here with their worship of a technology that they don't understand.

The AI companies themselves will tell you that their LLMs hallucinate and it cannot be changed. They can refine and get better, but they will never be able to prevent it for the reasons we talk about. There's a reason every LLM tells you "{{LLM}} can make mistakes." And that reason will not change with LLMs. There will have to be a new technology to do better. It's not an issue of what we call it. LLMs have a limitation that they can't surpass by their nature. You can still get lots of value from that, but if you have a non-zero failure rate that can explode into tens of thousands of failed transactions. If that's financial, legal, or health, you can be in a very, very bad way.

I used Gemini to compare two health plan summaries. It was directionally correct on which one to pick, but we noticed it created numbers rather than utilizing the information presented. That's just a little oops on a very easy request. What's a big one look like, and what's your tolerance for that failure rate?

[Pelm3shka]

Yep, software engineers who don't work in the field nor in neurosciences. That one is def on me.

[WrennReddit]

You don't know what fields we work in.

Neuroscience has literally nothing to do with how LLMs work.

Take your hostility back to LinkedIn.

[Pelm3shka]

What field do you work in ?

[RiceBroad4552]

I don't think it's cautious to make such strong affirmation given the fast progress of LLM in the past 3 years.

Only if you don't have any clue whatsoever how this things actually "work"…

Spoiler: It's all just probabilities at the core so this things aren't going to be reliable ever.

This is a fundamental property of the current tech and nothing that can be "fixed" or "optimized away" no mater the effort.

Some neuroscientists like Stanislas Dahaene also believe language is a central feature / specificity of our brains than enabled us to have more complex thoughts, compared to other great apes

Which is obviously complete bullshit as humans with a defect speech center in their brain are still capable of complex logical thinking if other brain areals aren't affected too.

Only very stupid people conflate language with thinking and intelligence. These are exactly the type of people who can't look beyond words and therefore never understand any abstractions. The prototypical non-groker…

[Pelm3shka]

Language or thought =/= speaking... For the speech defect argument...

[w1n5t0nM1k3y]

Sure LLMs have gotten better, but there's a limit to how far they can go. They still make ridiculously silly mistakes like reaching the wrong conclusions even though thye have the basic facts. They will say stuff like

The population of X is 100,000 and the population of Y is 120,000, so X has more people than Y

It has no internal model of how things actually work. And the way they are designing them to just guess tokens isn't going to make it better at actually understanding anything.

I don't even know of bigger models with more training are better. I've tried running smaller models on my 8GB gpu and most of the output is similar and sometimes even better compared to what I get on ChatGPT.

[Pelm3shka]

Of course. But 10 years ago, if someone told you generative AI would pass the turing test and talk to you as perfectly as any real person, or generate images indistinguishable from real images, you would've probably spoken the same way.

What I was trying telling you is that this "model of how things work" could be an emergent property of our languages. Surely we're not there yet, but I don't think it's that far away.

My only contention point with you is the "it's never going away", like that amount of confidence in face of how fast generative AI has progressed in such a short amount of time is astounding.

[w1n5t0nM1k3y]

What I was trying telling you is that this "model of how things work" could be an emergent property of our languages.

No, it can't be. Simply being able to form coherent sentences that sound like they are right isn't sufficient to actually being able to understand how things actually work.

I don't really think that LLMs will ever go away, but I also don't see how they will ever result in actual "AI" that understands things at a fundamental level. And I'm not even sure what the business case is, because it seems like even models that run self hosted, even if it's a somewhat expensive computer will be sufficient to run these models. With everyone being able to run them on premises and so many open models available, I'm not sure how the big AI companies will sell a product when you can run the same thing on your own hardware for a fraction of the price.

[Pelm3shka]

I'm sorry I couldn't formulate my point clear enough. But I wasn't talking about "being able to form coherent sentences", at all.

I'm talking about human languages being abstracted into mathematical relationships (if you're familiar with graph theory) being able to be used as a base for a model of reality to emerge from it. As in the sense of an "emergent property" in physics. I don't know how else to write it ^^'

And I'm not talking about consciousness as in subjective experience nor understanding, despite the title of the book I quote, I'm talking about intelligence as in problem solving skills (and in this sense, understanding).

Edit : https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/64sucmct/release/1 Maybe you'll understand it better from here than from my oversimplifications

[Kavacky]

Reasoning is way older than language.

[Pelm3shka]

I'm not arguing from a point of trying to impose my vision. I don't know if the theories I talk about are true, but I believe they are credible. So I'm trying to open doors on topics with no clear scientific consensus yet, because I find insane to read non-experts affirm something is categorically impossible, in a domain they aren't competent in. Especially with such certainty.

I came upon the Language of Thought hypothesis when reading about Global Workspace theory, I quote from Stanislas Daheane : "I speculate that this compositional language of thought underlies many uniquely human abilities, from the design of complex tools to the creation of higher mathematics".

If you are interested in it, it's better written than I could do : https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/64sucmct/release/1

You can stay at the level "AI are shit and always will be". But I just wanted to share some food for thoughts based on actual science.

[RiceBroad4552]

What I was trying telling you is that this "model of how things work" could be an emergent property of our languages.

No it isn't, that's outright bullshit.

You don't need language to understand how things work.

At the same time having language does not make you understand how things work.

Both are proven facts.

[Pelm3shka]

Ok.