You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
You can train an LLM on the best possible set of data without a single false statement and it will still hallucinate. And there’s nothing to be done against that.
Without understanding of the context everything can be true or false.
“The acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9.81m/s2” True or False?
LLM basically works like this: given the previous words written and their order, the most probable next word of the sentence is this one.
Well yes, I’ve seen those examples of ChatGPT citing scientific research papers that turned out to be completely made up, but at least it seems to be a step up from straight up shitposting, which is what you get when you train it on a dataset full of shitposts.
Well it’s definitely true that you will have hard times getting true things from garbage. But funny enough, the model might hallucinate true things:)