Karpathy on Hallucinations

Dream machines: it's a feature, not a bug

Andrey Karpathy posted:

I always struggle a bit with I'm asked about the "hallucination problem" in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful. It's only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a "hallucination". It looks like a bug, but it's just the LLM doing what it always does.

Andrey goes on to explain that when people complain about hallucinations, what they really mean is they don't want their LLM assistants hallucinating.

This implies an attempt to shift the focus away from LLMs - the source of the problem - ("too hard to fix") and attempt to shift the problem to some kind of safety layer within an AI assistant.

Cart, meet horse.