Source: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/115259068665906083
As a reminder, "hallucinations" are inevitable in LLMs
Explanation of hallucinations from 2023
I always struggle a bit with I'm asked about the "hallucination problem" in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines.
We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful.
It's only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a "hallucination". It looks like a bug, but it's just the LLM doing what it always does.
At the other end of the extreme consider a search engine. It takes the prompt and just returns one of the most similar "training documents" it has in its database, verbatim. You could say that this search engine has a "creativity problem" - it will never respond with something new. An LLM is 100% dreaming and has the hallucination problem. A search engine is 0% dreaming and has the creativity problem.
All that said, I realize that what people actually mean is they don't want an LLM Assistant (a product like ChatGPT etc.) to hallucinate. An LLM Assistant is a lot more complex system than just the LLM itself, even if one is at the heart of it. There are many ways to mitigate hallucinations in these systems - using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to more strongly anchor the dreams in real data through in-context learning is maybe the most common one. Disagreements between multiple samples, reflection, verification chains. Decoding uncertainty from activations. Tool use. All an active and very interesting areas of research.
TLDR I know I'm being super pedantic but the LLM has no "hallucination problem". Hallucination is not a bug, it is LLM's greatest feature. The LLM Assistant has a hallucination problem, and we should fix it.
Okay I feel much better now :)
Explanation source: https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1733299213503787018
Tbh, when I was nine, if you'd told me we were having dinosaur meat for dinner, and then served "dino nuggies", I'd have been delighted and happily played along. Like, I wouldn't have believed my mom was telling the truth, but I'd have pretended to.
Although, I'm a big sister, that probably plays a role. I absolutely played along with truly ridiculous little kid stuff a good 5+ years longer than your average child/teen would simply because my brother's four years younger than me and "don't wreck the magic for younger kids" was something I understood well and believed in strongly by the time he was crawling.
That's cute and I love it. You sound like a great big sister!
Aww, thanks. I just really love my brother (even though he doesn't like me at all now that he's a surly teenager who thinks he's all grown up) and always tried to be the big sister I would want if I was in his place. More than once, I avoided making a bad decision, utterly bewildering adults who thought any kid my age in that context would be easily pushed into that bad choice, because "I haven't got time for this nonsense. My little brother is expecting me home on time." and similar lines. No matter what happened, I always came home in one piece, because I couldn't leave him there alone wondering where I was.
But the best part was that I got to cling on to fun and silly little kid things for years longer than my peers, and tell any kid my age who gave me shit, "look, I just play along in front of my brother, you don't wreck the magic and wonder for littler guys, that's the rules."
Some eight year olds would realise Santa probably isn't real, or the Easter Bunny, or anything like that that we lie to kids about for a good reason, and go to school and tell every littler kid on the playground. Some who have little siblings or cousins, though, keep playing along until the younger kid in their immediate vicinity stops believing it. Because you don't wreck the fun for a younger kid you have to live with afterwards.
I couldn't be crappy to him on purpose. I had to live with him. And a lot of older siblings seem to forget that, then say "yeah, of course my little brother hates me and does nothing but drive me nuts, that's what little brothers do." Which, yeah, they often are little shits (affectionate, I swear), but you don't need to start off adversarial and make it worse.
GOOD sibling
Aww, thanks. I just try to be a person I'd want to hang out with, and a big part of that is to not treat young people like crap, even when they're being annoying. An annoying toddler is just a little human with big feelings. Even a screaming baby is crying for a reason, and you shouldn't get mad at the helpless infant or at the parent doing their best to find and solve the problem. (Getting mad at a neglectful parent with headphones on, though...) Little kids are silly sometimes, and require a lot of patience, but being patient with kids and playing along with silly stuff is a good thing to do if you can, and kids can be really fun if you're patient with them and treat them as people. Even though my little brother's not a little kid anymore, I still see him in every little boy who drives me nuts in public, and it reminds me to be patient with kids, all I wanted at that age was for grownups and bigger kids to be patient and take me seriously. Treat people the way you want to be treated. And that includes treating kids the way you would have wanted grownups to treat you as a kid. Don't just give a kid under your responsibility everything they want, but hear them out and don't be a jerk.
Thanks for this, I like your explanation
When Flash Gordon the animated series used to air on TV, the way the character was portrayed it was as though you should know who he is (maybe they expected you to have watched the movie), so I asked my father who Flash Gordon was and he said "Oh he used to be our neighbor", and I believed that until I was maybe fourteen, when sentience kicked in
No playing along needed, dino nuggies are made from the meat of a theropod dinosaur
I suppose that is technically true! Definitely some of the cutest dinosaurs I've ever seen, not sure how forbidden the hug is, but they sure look soft and huggable!