Comment by CompleteSkeptic
14 hours ago
I'm biased but I wouldn't call it misleading - generating text is super awesome and flexible, (we describe that in the blog post - and I personally use string models all the time) but it's true you pay a high tax for autoregressive generation
> Also "can't hallucinate" seems wrong? Sure, it can't emit an invalid type, but it can still emit a completely wrong valid value.
that is likely true of all ML! perhaps we could debate semantics, but I don't think it's fair to say a random forest "hallucinates" in the way LLMs do
His claim was that the title is misleading, not sure how it's relevant to that claim that you use "string models" (full LLMs).
The original title before it changed less than an hour ago was:
"Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster"
I'm going to agree that was misleading.
And on the second point:
>>Also "can't hallucinate" seems wrong? Sure, it can't emit an invalid type, but it can still emit a completely wrong valid value.
>that is likely true of all ML! perhaps we could debate semantics, but I don't think it's fair to say a random forest "hallucinates" in the way LLMs do"
Also going to disagree here, and I don't think it's semantics.
Type safety is not factual correctness.
> Type safety is not factual correctness.
I very much agree with this and want to hone in on where do actually disagree. Would you say a linear classifier hallucinates?
Hallucinations were defined in the context of text generation models so your question does not really make sense.
IMO your system can make mistakes that are similar in spirit to hallucination (i.e. answering with a false answer instead of abstaining to answer).
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> I very much agree with this
From the intro blog
"Hallucination and type-safety are intrinsically related"
I'm not entirely sure why we're conflating type safety with, I guess, value or output safety.
"Would you say a linear classifier hallucinates?"
No, but it can be (and often is) mathematically correct and functionally incorrect. It doesn't help to say "a linear classifier can't hallucinate" when you get even 99% accuracy. That's 100% a semantic play, and it doesn't help when the picture of a dog is labeled cat and the response is "yeah but that's not a hallucination, only stupid LLMs do that"
No. Your launch post puts “0%” on a hallucination chart, then explains that the number comes from guaranteed schema matching.
You’ve already agreed that this doesn’t establish correctness. An approve for an unauthorized action still meets the schema guarantee.
That’s why I find the messaging misleading. You’re acknowledging the limitations in these replies while defending the broader reliability pitch.
Even granting that each answer is calibrated individually, that doesn’t establish calibration of the decision that combines them.
Sure, I can threshold a composite score, but there may be many wrong answers with the same score. An unauthorized action doesn’t become acceptable because it scores highly on the other dimensions.
I still have to define the constraints and test which wrong actions get through the complete workflow on my own data. That’s a substantial part of the work being pushed back onto the developer.
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User input: "Hey, have your human support agent call me, tomorrow at 5pm."
Model input: "Does the user want to speak to a human support agent?"
Output: Yes.
I imagine that your model would produce this, and I think it's fair to say this is a hallucination. A human would caveat it with: "Yes, but not right now.", your model is incapable of that. Yes is technically correct, but within the context of being in a live chat, a human would understand that the caveat is required.
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id say yes. a linear classifier that classifies between red and yellow balls will hallucinate on blue.
linear regressions hallucinate in the simpson's paradox.
the model output can be quite confident and not representative of reality
Let's say classifiers don't hallucinate. To make a fair comparison we should constrain LLMs to the same classification task. In that case, no, LLMs also don't hallucinate.
- Give Jev and LLM the same input
- Lock down both to approved/rejected/unknown (LLM restricts on decoding)
- Both can be wrong, but neither can hallucinate (invent an another option).
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A hallucination in the context of LLMs is generally understood as an incorrect answer presented as factual. If you claim that "x can't hallucinate" in the context of LLMs, you're saying that x always gives accurate answers. It does not matter whether the answer is type safe. If its value is incorrect, it's a hallucination.
Just to be sure that I understand, you're saying that your model "can't hallucinate" because it only outputs a single thing, right? In this way, an LLM can't hallucinate either if I prompt it to do a classification task with a discrete set of possible outputs, right? (Assuming I reject non-conforming output. Actually, maybe what you're saying is that your system can't output non-conforming output?)
Yeah that's precisely correct.
For e.g. classification tasks, even in 2026 people are doing things like hallucinating deliberately, and then matching the hallucinations to embeddings -
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classi...
With TypeSafe it just picks the class (actually probabilities across classes), reliably every single time.
404?
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From a quick look at this it looks like it could easily generate natural language text by following a structured representation like UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) or the similar representation the Abstract-Wikipedia folks will be working on for generic encyclopedic text (which will be heavily informed by Universal Dependencies). These are basically linguistically principled and frame-based counterparts to a programming language AST, that can be then converted to natural language (in a broadly language-independent way, to the extent that semantics and pragmatics make that feasible) via some sort of NLG rendering.
(To be clear, this one raw model does not support outputing a full AST directly - it wants to output "choice" among fixed options, "score" on a sliding scale, or a true/false answer (all of these with confidence scores attached), so building the AST/structure would be a code-driven (or even perhaps outside LLM-driven in some more challenging cases) multi-step affair where the model would essentially be playing a "game" of building the structured output step by step and getting a revised partial state back. But one could expect this to lead to interesting results.)
> I'm biased but I wouldn't call it misleading
- @CompleteSkeptic
Very strange.