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LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This
arxiv.orgAs Large Language Models become more ubiquitous across domains, it becomes important to examine their inherent limitations critically. This work argues that hallucinations in language models are not just occasional errors but an inevitable feature of these systems. We demonstrate that hallucinations stem from the fundamental mathematical and logical structure of LLMs. It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms. Our analysis draws on computational theory and Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which references the undecidability of problems like the Halting, Emptiness, and Acceptance Problems. We demonstrate that every stage of the LLM process-from training data compilation to fact retrieval, intent classification, and text generation-will have a non-zero probability of producing hallucinations. This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.



I worked somewhere once where they had an algorithm that placed items according to rules it was given, and it would output variations based on the rules to give the user some output options to work with. Think A or B could go here, and the different outcomes based on if you started with A or B.
It was pretty complex, but ultimately it was just a deterministic outcome of many possible deterministic outcomes based off the rules and what you started with.
They marketed that shit as AI.
It infuriated me.
No machine learning, no neural nets, no reinforcement learning, or learning of any kind, just placing things based off rules.
And don’t get me wrong, it was good, just not AI.