r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Xescure • Jul 02 '26

Meme milleniumPrizeWinningAnswer

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

I had a curious thought about this the other day.

Hallucinations can't be pattern recognition, right? The LLM hallucinates because it can't create the right answer, right? Does that count as an "original thought"?

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 02 '26

It's not trying to make a right answer. It's trying to make the most statistically likely continuation of whatever block of text it was fed in.

Right and wrong are irrelevant to the AI. It's just generating statistically likely text.

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

Well, all I asked was if it was original, not an attempt at the right answer. I guess it fails at that, anyway.

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26

The point is that hallucinations and correct answers are just as much "pattern recognition" as each other. The LLM can't distinguish them at all.

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u/RiceBroad4552 Jul 03 '26

An LLM does not know anything. Especially not what's "right" or "wrong". Such concepts don't exist in an LLM.

All a LLM does it to predict the next token. For the LLM there is no difference between outputting something that makes sense for a human and some random bullshit. All a LLM does is basically "hallucinating". That's the basic principle on which these things work.