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catlifeonmars • today at 11:59 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

It’s still a common occurrence.

It happens in more subtle ways, but it still happens often enough for me to notice. For example I have had hallucinated checksums show up in lock files as recently as yesterday using a SOTA model.

This is not surprising, since the whole basis of LLM training is to produce output that humans will accept _as a proxy for actual training goals_. In a sense, the training process of an LLM “wants” to produce output that is statistically plausible much more than it “wants” to produce correct output. It’s always going to be a struggle to drive that system towards other goals (and we see this bourne out in practice by the amount of effort that is required to be spent on RL).

I think there will be some threshold of correctness (something like 99.999% of the time) that if the model surpasses it, I can stop needing to check it, but I think we’re still at 99% or something which sounds good, but when you are producing a ton of output you hit that 1% frequently.

> Consequently it would seem unwise to assume that current limitations will remain as they are and prevent LLMs from coming up with solutions that they can explain to humans.

I 100% agree with this. In fact explaining things to humans is something LLMs are particularly well suited for.