alt Hacker News>>> I'm not anthropomorphizing anything ...
Yes you are, regarding LLMs at least. Here's why:
just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to ...
[be] capable of understanding if it's gone off on
a hallucinatory path ...
You then went on to state:
> If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.
Again, "hallucinating" is not something an algorithm can do. Also, determining factuality is again subjective based on the person assessing the information.
Replies
hardbass • yesterday at 8:04 AM
You have 'logic' in your name. You would be well aware of the physical Church Turing statement and as of yet it has held up. Everything, including our brain, as we currently know, is an algorithm.
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You ever heard of something called a metaphor, guy? I use the word "smart" as shorthand to describe something that scores highly in a number of coding and terminal use benchmarks (as compared to, let's say, a 30B size model from one and a half years ago.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
You will note that in my original comment I very specifically said "deepseek v4 flash 0731", which by many benchmarks/metrics, is "smarter" (again, this is a metaphor) than a smaller or older model. It is also specifically known to be relatively capable of producing code and formulas on demand in several common languages.
And "hallucinating" to mean "outputs plausible sounding gibberish that doesn't hold together consistently". Of course there's no actual hallucination going on.