[starbugs]

> I think it's fair to say that these models may have some grasp of reality insofar as the data we collect ballparks reality, and also insofar as the mechanism to learn from the data effectively extracts the truth value of the data.

No, it would be fair to say they have a "grasp" of predicting the next word in a given sequence of words based on a set of words in their training set. Hallucination then is what people call their inherent tendency to run into a situation where the probability of the next word being predicted "wrong" is high. And once one "wrong" word has been predicted the probability that the next word is also "wrong" rises exponentially.

LLMs do not have any grasp of reality. They just predict text based on trained patterns. Too many people have been fooled into believing that LLMs can understand anything about reality, but a word-based description of reality is not the same as reality.

> We might say the same thing about people.

If you want to reduce a human being down to being a word predictor, then I guess you could say that?

[jart]

You don't understand anything about reality. For all you know, you're living in Plato's cave. What you kind of know, is just text you read from a physics book. The things your eyes see, could just as easily be encoded as tokens and fed into an LLM.