this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Not to be that guy, but the image with all the traintracks might just be doing it's job perfectly.
The one on the right prints “hello world” to the terminal
And takes 5 seconds to do it
Engineers love moving parts, known for their reliability and vigor
Vigor killed me
Might is the important here
It gives you the right picture when you asked for a single straight track on the prompt. Now you have to spend 10 hours debugging code and fixing hallucinations of functions that don't exist on libraries it doesn't even neet to import.
Not a developer. I just wonder about AI hallucinations come about. Is it the 'need' to complete the task requested at the cost of being wrong?
Full disclosure - my background is in operations (think IT) not AI research. So some of this might be wrong.
What's marketed as AI is something called a large language model. This distinction is important because AI implies intelligence - where as a LLM is something else. At a high level LLMs are using something called "tokens" to break apart natural language into elements that a machine can understand, and then recombining those tokens to "create" something new. When a LLM is creating output it does not know what it is saying - it knows what token statistically comes after the token(s) it has generated already.
So to answer your question. An AI can hallucinate because it does not know the answer - its using advanced math to know that the period goes at the end of the sentence. and not in the middle.
While being more complex and costly to maintain
Depends on the usecase. It's most likely at a trainyard or trainstation.
The image implies that the track on the left meets the use case criteria