Post #2293545

Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements but if it was that easy then you wouldn’t have [insert the entire intellectual history of the human species]. I’m chiming in to agree with Architeuthis and mention a citation explaining more. LLMs have a hard minimum rate of hallucinations based on the rate of “monofacts” in their training data (arxiv.org/html/2502.08666v1). Basically, facts that appear independently and only once in the training data cause the LLM to “learn” that you can have a certain rate of disconnected “facts” that appear nowhere else, and cause it to in turn generate output similar to that, which in practice is basically random and thus basically guaranteed to be false. And as Architeuthis says, the ability of LLMs to “generalize” basically means they compose true information together in ways that is sometimes false. So to the extent you want your LLM to ever “generalize”, you also get an unavoidable minimum of hallucinations that way. So yeah, even given an even more absurdly big training data source that was also magically perfectly curated you wouldn’t be able to iron out the intrinsic flaws of LLMs.