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by paulddraper 28 days ago
Exactly.

If you've never had an LLM (all models) suddenly start spouting nonsense in a completely different language...you haven't been using LLMs that much. They will go absolutely insane some % of the time.

4 comments

Worth looking at https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

They can “go insane” but it seems often to be infra related as opposed to anything one would consider hallucination. Smaller models will often get stuck repeating a word or phrase forever but that’s a bit different and nobody would call it hallucination.

When you can reliably prompt these things into insanity, then it's demonstrably not an infrastructure issue.
Can you explain that please?

(Not the syllogism, the premise)

I've used LLMs quite a lot (Claude, GPT) and have never seen this behavior. You've got something else going on.
Chinese models will do that.
I've used LLMs all day five days a week plus my own free time for the last year or so (new job).

I've seen plenty of hallucinations and context collapse behaviours.

I've never seen that.

One annoying one is we have an LLM-as-a-judge that is supposed to quote parts of a transcript to justify its reasoning, and sometimes it’ll get stuck on something short like “No.” and then just endlessly repeat it: “4. No. 5. No. […] 728. No. […] 1435. No. …”