[nikkindev]

Author here: Wholeheartedly agree with your comment on hallucination. I initially set out to answer the question “Will entropy help identify hallucination?” And soon realised that it doesn’t, for the same reasons you mentioned above. So I pivoted to just writing about the entropy measure in the post. And this is also reflected by how I started with hallucination and then quickly veered away from it. I’ll be more careful in future posts & conversations. Thanks!

[K0balt]

Nice post, really, and I think it will help some people to understand more about how LLMs work, especially helping fix the dogma about “LLMs just randomly select the next most likely word” which is kinda true but so many qualifiers and contextual details apply that the statement is more misleading than useful.

On undesired output, I would think it a great service to the field if we could come up with a better and earwormier word for “hallucinations” and somehow make it stick.

Right now we have half the literate world walking around thinking that LLMs are licking frogs, and it does nothing to help people understand how to think about model outputs or how to increase the utility of these fantastic culture / data mining tools in their own lives.