y Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

It has been a year and a half now since the first Large Language Model (LLM) AI app was introduced to the public in November of 2022, with the release of Microsoft’s ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI.

Google, Elon Musk, and many others have also now developed or are in the process of developing their own versions of these AI programs, but after 18 months now, the #1 problem for these LLM AI programs remains the fact that they still lie and make stuff up when asked questions too difficult for them to answer.

It is called “hallucination” in the tech world, and while there was great hope when Microsoft introduced the first version of this class of AI back in 2022 that it would soon render accurate results, that accuracy remains illusive, as they continue to “hallucinate.”

Here is a report that was just published today, May 6, 2024:

Large Language Model (LLM) adoption is reaching another level in 2024. As Valuates reports, the LLM market was valued at 10.5 Billion USD in 2022 and is anticipated to hit 40.8 Billion USD by 2029, with a staggering Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.4%.
Imagine a machine so native to language that it can write poems, translate languages, and answer your questions in captivating detail. LLMs are doing just that, rapidly transforming fields like communication, education, and creative expression. Yet, amidst their brilliance lies a hidden vulnerability, the whisper of hallucination.
These AI models can sometimes invent facts, fabricate stories, or simply get things wrong.
These hallucinations might seem harmless at first glance – a sprinkle of fiction in a poem, a mistranslated phrase. But the consequences can be real, with misleading information, biased outputs, and even eroded trust in technology.
So, it becomes crucial to ask, how can we detect and mitigate these hallucinations, ensuring LLMs speak truth to power, not fantastical fabrications? (Full article.)

Many are beginning to understand this limitation in LLM AI, and are realizing that there are no real solutions to this problem, because it is an inherent limitation of artificial computer-based “intelligence.”

A synonym of the word “artificial” is “fake”, or “not real.” Instead of referring to this kind of computer language as AI, we would probably be more accurate in just calling it FI, Fake Intelligence.

Kyle Wiggers, writing for Tech Crunch, reported on the failures of some of these recent attempts to cure the hallucinations of LLM AI a few days ago.

Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem
Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations.
Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, a source recounts an instance where Microsoft’s generative AI invented meeting attendees and implied that conference calls were about subjects that weren’t actually discussed on the call.
As I wrote a while ago, hallucinations may be an unsolvable problem with today’s transformer-based model architectures. (Full article.)

Devin Coldewey, also writing for Tech Crunch, published an excellent piece last month that describes this huge problem of hallucinating inherent in AI LLMs:

The Great Pretender
AI doesn’t know the answer, and it hasn’t learned how to care.
There is a good reason not to trust what today’s AI constructs tell you, and it has nothing to do with the fundamental nature of intelligence or humanity, with Wittgensteinian concepts of language representation, or even disinfo in the dataset.
All that matters is that these systems do not distinguish between something that is correct and something that looks correct.
Once you understand that the AI considers these things more or less interchangeable, everything makes a lot more sense.
Now, I don’t mean to short circuit any of the fascinating and wide-ranging discussions about this happening continually across every form of media and conversation. We have everyone from philosophers and linguists to engineers and hackers to bartenders and firefighters questioning and debating what “intelligence” and “language” truly are, and whether something like ChatGPT possesses them.
This is amazing! And I’ve learned a lot already as some of the smartest people in this space enjoy their moment in the sun, while from the mouths of comparative babes come fresh new perspectives.
But at the same time, it’s a lot to sort through over a beer or coffee when someone asks “what about all this GPT stuff, kind of scary how smart AI is getting, right?” Where do you start — with Aristotle, the mechanical Turk, the perceptron or “Attention is all you need”?
There are only three things to understand, which lead to a natural conclusion:

1. These models are created by having them observe the relationships between words and sentences and so on in an enormous dataset of text, then build their own internal statistical map of how all these millions and millions of words and concepts are associated and correlated. No one has said, this is a noun, this is a verb, this is a recipe, this is a rhetorical device; but these are things that show up naturally in patterns of usage.
2. These models are not specifically taught how to answer questions, in contrast to the familiar software companies like Google and Apple have been calling AI for the last decade. Those are basically Mad Libs with the blanks leading to APIs: Every question is either accounted for or produces a generic response. With large language models the question is just a series of words like any other.
3. These models have a fundamental expressive quality of “confidence” in their responses. In a simple example of a cat recognition AI, it would go from 0, meaning completely sure that’s not a cat, to 100, meaning absolutely sure that’s a cat. You can tell it to say “yes, it’s a cat” if it’s at a confidence of 85, or 90, whatever produces your preferred response metric.

So given what we know about how the model works, here’s the crucial question: What is it confident about? It doesn’t know what a cat or a question is, only statistical relationships found between data nodes in a training set. A minor tweak would have the cat detector equally confident the picture showed a cow, or the sky, or a still life painting. The model can’t be confident in its own “knowledge” because it has no way of actually evaluating the content of the data it has been trained on.
The AI is expressing how sure it is that its answer appears correct to the user.
This is true of the cat detector, and it is true of GPT-4 — the difference is a matter of the length and complexity of the output. The AI cannot distinguish between a right and wrong answer — it only can make a prediction of how likely a series of words is to be accepted as correct. That is why it must be considered the world’s most comprehensively informed bullshitter rather than an authority on any subject. It doesn’t even know it’s bullshitting you — it has been trained to produce a response that statistically resembles a correct answer, and it will say anything to improve that resemblance.
The AI doesn’t know the answer to any question, because it doesn’t understand the question. It doesn’t know what questions are.
It doesn’t “know” anything! The answer follows the question because, extrapolating from its statistical analysis, that series of words is the most likely to follow the previous series of words. Whether those words refer to real places, people, locations, etc. is not material — only that they are like real ones.
It’s the same reason AI can produce a Monet-like painting that isn’t a Monet — all that matters is it has all the characteristics that cause people to identify a piece of artwork as his. (Full article.)

“AI” was the new buzz word for 2023 where everything and anything related to computer code was being called “AI” as investors were literally throwing $trillions into this “new” technology.

But when you actually examine it, it really is not that new at all.

Most people are familiar with Apple’s female voice “Siri” or Amazon.com’s female voice “Alexa” that responds to spoken language and returns a response. This is “AI” and has been around for over a decade.

What’s “new” with “generative AI” like the new LLM applications, is the power and energy to calculate responses has greatly been expanded to make it appear as if the computer is talking back with you as it rapidly produces text.

But these LLM’s don’t actually create anything new. They take existing data that has been fed to them, and can now rapidly calculate that data at speeds so fast that it makes the older technology that powers programs like Siri and Alexa seem to be babies who have yet learned how to talk like adults.

But it is still limited to the amount, and the accuracy, of the data it is trained on. It might be able to “create” new language structures by manipulating the data, but it cannot create the data itself.

Another way to look at it, would be to observe that what it is doing in the real world is making humans better liars, by not accurately representing the core data.

This enhanced ability to lie really struck me recently when watching a commercial for the new Google Phones:

Here Google is clearly teaching people how to deceive people and lie about the actual data that a Google phone captures by using “AI”, as in photographs.

Lying and deceiving people sells, while the truth most often does not, and when the public watches a commercial like this for Google’s latest phone, the reaction, I am sure, among most, is that this is really great stuff, as our society has now conditioned us to believe that lying and deceiving people is OK in most situations.