Comment by hn_throwaway_99
2 months ago
This is awesome, but minor quibble with the title - "hallucinates" is the wrong verb here. You specifically asked it to make up a 10-year-in-the-future HN frontpage, and that's exactly what it did. "Hallucinates" means when it randomly makes stuff up but purports it to be the truth. If some one asks me to write a story for a creative writing class, and I did, you wouldn't say I "hallucinated" the story.
(I should have thought of this yesterday but have just replaced 'hallucinates' with 'imagines' in the title...though one could object to that too...)
It so very weird to see this called "hallucinate", as we all have more or less used it for "made up erroneously".
Is this a push to override the meaning and erase the hallucination critique?
At some point, no matter how something is mentioned, someone will offer criticism. I guess that in roughly 20% of all HN front page posts, at least one person comments on the terminology used. I do not see this as an argument against using accurate terminology, but rather as a reminder that it is impossible to meet everyone's expectations.
There are other terms that are similarly controversial, such as "thinking models". When you describe an LLM as "thinking", it often triggers debate because people interpret the term differently and bring their own expectations and assumptions into the discussion.
If someone asked you, you would know about the context. LLMs are predictors, no matter the context length, they never "know" what they are doing. They simply predict tokens.
This common response is pretty uninteresting and misleading. They simply predict tokens? Oh. What does the brain do, exactly?
We don't how
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The brain has intrinsic understanding of the world engraved in our DNA. We do not simply predict tokens based on knowledge, we base our thoughts on intelligence, emotions and knowledge. LLMs neither have intelligence nor emotions. If your brain simply predicts tokens I feel sorry for you.
Edit: really does not surprise me that AI bros downvote this. Expecting to understand human values from people that want to make themselves obsolete was a mistake.
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It does exactly the same, predicts tokens, but it's totally different and superior to LLMs /s
OTOH, brain tokens seem to be concept based and not always linguistic (many people think solely in images/concepts).
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"Predicts"