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by mjburgess 1058 days ago
> I don't believe the nature of LLM is to hallucinate. It's instead a side effect of how we train them. We train them to guess, to be close, but not to be correct necessarily.

Thoughout this comment you speak about LLMs as-if they're animals, or real physical objects. An LLM is a formal model which is just to generate a sequence of tokens maximally probabilistically consistent with a corpus of historical text.

A digital machine running a LLM program is a physical object which necessarily generates text based on "guessing" because that's the algorithm it's running. LLMs are "guessing algorithms", all of Machine Learning is -- it is dumb brute-force analysis of conditional probability.

> GPT4 is roughly 40 times smaller than a human brain

This doesn't make any sense. GPT4 is an abstract algorithm with no "size". The brain has 10^{big number} cells, and GPT4 can be specified with a single real number. Is that the comparison to make? No, both comparisons are incoherent.

A physical device running GPT4 can be given a "size", but it would again have nothing to do with a brain.

LLMs arent living things where we can "measure their size" and "train them to know, rather than to guess". They are just the equation, `max P(answer|propmt, historical_corpus)`

A machine running GPT4 is just an electrical device generating text according to the rule given above. There is no sense of "training it to do something other than guesswork", and no sense of "size"