The thing that would now make the biggest difference isn't "more intelligence", whatever that might mean, but better grounding.
It's still a big issue that the models will make up plausible sounding but wrong or misleading explanations for things, and verifying their claims ends up taking time. And if it's a topic you don't care about enough, you might just end up misinformed.
I think Google/Gemini realize this, since their "verify" feature is designed to address exactly this. Unfortunately it hasn't worked very well for me so far.
But to me it's very clear that the product that gets this right will be the one I use.
Exactly! One important thing LLMs have made me realise deeply is "No information" is better than false information. The way LLMs pull out completely incorrect explanations baffles me - I suppose that's expected since in the end it's generating tokens based on its training and it's reasonable it might hallucinate some stuff, but knowing this doesn't ease any of my frustration.
IMO if LLMs need to focus on anything right now, they should focus on better grounding. Maybe even something like a probability/confidence score, might end up experience so much better for so many users like me.
It’s tempting to think of a language model as a shallow search engine that happens to output text, but that metaphor doesn’t actually match what’s happening under the hood. A model doesn’t “know” facts or measure uncertainty in a Bayesian sense. All it really does is traverse a high‑dimensional statistical manifold of language usage, trying to produce the most plausible continuation.
That’s why a confidence number that looks sensible can still be as made up as the underlying output, because both are just sequences of tokens tied to trained patterns, not anchored truth values. If you want truth, you want something that couples probability distributions to real world evidence sources and flags when it doesn’t have enough grounding to answer, ideally with explicit uncertainty, not hand‑waviness.
People talk about hallucination like it’s a bug that can be patched at the surface level. I think it’s actually a feature of the architecture we’re using: generating plausible continuations by design. You have to change the shape of the model or augment it with tooling that directly references verified knowledge sources before you get reliability that matters.
Exactly the same issue occurs with search.
Unfortunately not everybody knows to mistrust AI responses, or have the skills to double-check information.
LLMs are very good at detecting patterns.
Are there even any "hallucination" public benchmarks?
I believe the real issue is that LLMs are still so bad at reasoning. In my experience, the worst hallucinations occur where only handful of sources exist for some set of facts (e.g laws of small countries or descriptions of niche products).
LLMs know these sources and they refer to them but they are interpreting them incorrectly. They are incapable of focusing on the semantics of one specific page because they get "distracted" by their pattern matching nature.
Now people will say that this is unavoidable given the way in which transformers work. And this is true.
But shouldn't it be possible to include some measure of data sparsity in the training so that models know when they don't know enough? That would enable them to boost the weight of the context (including sources they find through inference time search/RAG) relative to to their pretraining.
One of these days I had a doubt about something related to how pointers work in Swift and I tried discussing with ChatGPT (don’t remember exactly what, but it was purely intellectual curiosity). It gave me a lot of explanations that seemed correct, but being skeptical and started pushing it for ways to confirm what it was saying and eventually realized it was all bullshit.
This kind of thing makes me basically wary of using LLMs for anything that isn’t brainstorming, because anything that requires knowing information that isn’t easily/plentifully found online will likely be incorrect or have sprinkles of incorrect all over the explanations.
As a user I want it but as webadmin it kills dynamic pages and that's why Proof of work aka CPU time captchas like Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis#user-content-anubis or BotID https://vercel.com/docs/botid are now everywhere. If only these AI crawlers did some caching, but no just go and overrun the web. To the effect that they can't anymore, at the price of shutting down small sites and making life worse for everyone, just for few months of rapacious crawling. Literally Perplexity moved fast and broke things.
I think the end result is just an internet resource I need is a little harder to access, and we have to waste a small amount of energy.
From Tavis Ormandy who wrote a C program to solve the Anubis challenges out of browser https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45787775
Guess a mix of Markov tarpits and llm meta instructions will be added, cf. Feed the bots https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711094 and Nephentes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725147
What would really be useful is a very similar prompt should always give a very very similar result.
maybe it can work if you are running your own inference.
Bad news, it's winter now in the Northern hemisphere, so expect all of our AIs to get slightly less performant as they emulate humans under-performing until Spring.
I'm not an expert on the topic, but to me it sounds plausible that a good part of the problem of confabulation comes down to misaligned incentives. These models are trained hard to be a 'helpful assistant', and this might conflict with telling the truth.
Being free of hallucinations is a bit too high a bar to set anyway. Humans are extremely prone to confabulations as well, as can be seen by how unreliable eye witness reports tend to be. We usually get by through efficient tool calling (looking shit up), and some of us through expressing doubt about our own capabilities (critical thinking).
I don't think "wrong memory" is accurate, it's missing information and doesn't know it or is trained not to admit it.
Checkout the Dwarkesh Podcast episode https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 starting at 1:45:38
Here is the relevant quote by Trenton Bricken from the transcript:
One example I didn't talk about before with how the model retrieves facts: So you say, "What sport did Michael Jordan play?" And not only can you see it hop from like Michael Jordan to basketball and answer basketball. But the model also has an awareness of when it doesn't know the answer to a fact. And so, by default, it will actually say, "I don't know the answer to this question." But if it sees something that it does know the answer to, it will inhibit the "I don't know" circuit and then reply with the circuit that it actually has the answer to. So, for example, if you ask it, "Who is Michael Batkin?" —which is just a made-up fictional person— it will by default just say, "I don't know." It's only with Michael Jordan or someone else that it will then inhibit the "I don't know" circuit.
But what's really interesting here and where you can start making downstream predictions or reasoning about the model, is that the "I don't know" circuit is only on the name of the person. And so, in the paper we also ask it, "What paper did Andrej Karpathy write?" And so it recognizes the name Andrej Karpathy, because he's sufficiently famous, so that turns off the "I don't know" reply. But then when it comes time for the model to say what paper it worked on, it doesn't actually know any of his papers, and so then it needs to make something up. And so you can see different components and different circuits all interacting at the same time to lead to this final answer.
One demo of this that reliably works for me:
Write a draft of something and ask the LLM to find the errors.
Correct the errors, repeat.
It will never stop finding a list of errors!
The first time around and maybe the second it will be helpful, but after you've fixed the obvious things, it will start complaining about things that are perfectly fine, just to satisfy your request of finding errors.
"In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called bullshitting,[1][2] confabulation,[3] or delusion[4]) is"
LLMs are being sold as viable replacement of paid employees.
If they were not, they wouldn’t be funded the way they are.
The purpose of mechanisation is to standardise and over the long term reduce errors to zero.
Otoh “The final truth is there is no truth”
It is bad only in case of reporting on facts.
Gemini (the app) has a "mitigation" feature where it tries to to Google searches to support its statements. That doesn't currently work properly in my experience.
It also seems to be doing something where it adds references to statements (With a separate model? With a second pass over the output? Not sure how that works.). That works well where it adds them, but it often doesn't do it.
Reality is perfectly fine with deception and inaccuracy. For language to magically be self constraining enough to only make verified statements is… impossible.
One area that I've found to be a great example of this is sports science.
Depending on how you ask, you can get a response lifted from scientific literature, or the bro science one, even in the course of the same discussion.
It makes sense, both have answers to similar questions and are very commonly repeated online.
Due to how LLMs are implemented, you are always most likely to get a bogus explanation if you ask for an answer first, and why second.
A useful mental model is: imagine if I presented you with a potential new recruit's complete data (resume, job history, recordings of the job interview, everything) but you only had 1 second to tell me "hired: YES OR NO"
And then, AFTER you answered that, I gave you 50 pages worth of space to tell me why your decision is right. You can't go back on that decision, so all you can do is justify it however you can.
Do you see how this would give radically different outcomes vs. giving you the 50-page scratchpad first to think things through, and then only giving me a YES/NO answer?
Mostly we're not trying to win a nobel prize, develop some insanely difficult algorithm, or solve some silly leetcode problem. Instead we're doing relatively simple things. Some of those things are very repetitive as well. Our core job as programmers is automating things that are repetitive. That always was our job. Using AI models to do boring repetitive things is a smart use of time. But it's nothing new. There's a long history of productivity increasing tools that take boring repetitive stuff away. Compilation used to be a manual process that involved creating stacks of punch cards. That's what the first automated compilers produced as output: stacks of punch cards. Producing and stacking punchcards is not a fun job. It's very repetitive work. Compilers used to be people compiling punchcards. Women mostly, actually. Because it was considered relatively low skilled work. Even though it arguably wasn't.
Some people are very unhappy that the easier parts of their job are being automated and they are worried that they get completely automated away completely. That's only true if you exclusively do boring, repetitive, low value work. Then yes, your job is at risk. If your work is a mix of that and some higher value, non repetitive, and more fun stuff to work on, your life could get a lot more interesting. Because you get to automate away all the boring and repetitive stuff and spend more time on the fun stuff. I'm a CTO. I have lots of fun lately. Entire new side projects that I had no time for previously I can now just pull off in a spare few hours.
Ironically, a lot of people currently get the worst of both worlds because they now find themselves baby sitting AIs doing a lot more of the boring repetitive stuff than they would be able to do without that to the point where that is actually all that they do. It's still boring and repetitive. And it should be automated away ultimately. Arguably many years ago actually. The reason so many react projects feel like Ground Hog Day is because they are very repetitive. You need a login screen, and a cookies screen, and a settings screen, etc. Just like the last 50 projects you did. Why are you rebuilding those things from scratch? Manually? These are valid questions to ask yourself if you are a frontend programmer. And now you have AI to do that for you.
Find something fun and valuable to work on and AI gets a lot more fun because it gives you more quality time with the fun stuff. AI is about doing more with less. About raising the ambition level.
Retrieval.
And then hallucination even in the face of perfect context.
Both are currently unsolved.
(Retrieval's doing pretty good but it's a Rube Goldberg machine of workarounds. I think the second problem is a much bigger issue.)
I've been working on this problem with https://citellm.com, specifically for PDFs.
Instead of relying on the LLM answer alone, each extracted field links to its source in the original document (page number + highlighted snippet + confidence score).
Checking any claim becomes simple: click and see the exact source.
Not to mention it's super easy to gaslight these models, just asserting something wrong with vaguely plausible explanation and you get no pushback or reasoning validation.
So I know you qualified your post with "for your use case", but personally I would very much like more intelligence from LLMs.
