[andsoitis]

> That is a problem even now though. Sometimes LLMs just goof up for no reason. Maybe they are conscious.

LLMs are neural networks trained on huge volumes of text. They are statistical machine that learns patterns and relationships from the training set. The text is diverse: from fiction to scientific. An LLM predicts (autocompletes) the next word in a sentence based on context from the preceding words.

Hallucination happens because LLMs are designed to generate text that is coherent and contextually appropriate rather than factually accurate. Training data contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, fictional content and the model has no world view or principles or experience or an opinion or other way to disinguish between fact and fiction. So what it outputs aligns with patterns in teh training data but it isn't grounded in reality.

Putting it differntly, LLMs lack ground truth from external sources.