• davidgro@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    No, it’s a direct consequence of the structure of an LLM. You may have heard them called “fancy autocorrect” and that’s because in a very real way, that’s what an LLM does: based on the text in its conversation (the user’s, its own, the system prompt, search results, etc) it picks one of the most likely next words. Then starts over with that new word included.
    “Most likely” in this case is based on the weights from training, but the important thing is that it’s inherently statistical in nature, there’s no enforcing of hard facts possible, and even limiting it to only the very most likely next word each time causes unnatural text and problems such as loops - while still not being 100% accurate.

    • foodandart@lemmy.zip
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      8 hours ago

      Thank you for the clarification! I have a layperson’s understanding of LLMs as I just do not use any of the ai tools that are showing up in front of me.

      I try to stay up on it, rather than just rejecting the technology outright.

      Don’t use it, don’t plan to, but still want to understand it’s strengths and shortcomings.

      • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.zip
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        7 hours ago

        Yea the great weakness with LLM’s is that statistically a hallucination is inevitable. So its output always should be human verified.