Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

The problem with AI hallucinations is not that the AI was fed inaccurate information, it's that it's coming up with information that it wasn't fed in the first place.

As you say, this is a problem that humans have. But I'm not terribly surprised these AIs have it because they're being built in mimicry of how aspects of the human mind works. And in some cases it's desirable behaviour, for example when you're using an AI as a creative assistant. You want it to come up with new stuff in those situations.

It's just something you need to keep in mind when coming up with applications.

What weirds me out is that the things it has issues with when generating images/video are basically a list of things lucid dreamers check on to see if they're awake or dreaming.

1. Hands. Are your hands... Hands? Do they make sense?

2. Written language. Does it look like normal written language?

(3. Turn the lights off/4. Pinch your nose and breath through it) - these two not so much

5. How did I get here? Where was I before this? Does the transition make sense?

6. Mirrors. Are they accurate?

7. Displays on digital devices. Do they look normal?

8. Clocks. Digital and analog... Do they look like they're telling time? Even if they do, look away and check again.

(9. Physics, try to do something physically impossible, like poking your finger through your palm. 10. Do you recognize people/do they recognize you) - on two more that aren't relevant.

But still... It's kinda remarkable.

Also, Nvidia launched their earth 2 earth simulator recently. So, simulation theory confirmed, I guess.

There's also the fact that they can't tell reality apart from fiction in general, because they don't understand anything in the first place.

LLMs have no way of differentiating fantasy RPG elements from IRL things. So they can lose the plot on what is being discussed suddenly, and for seemingly no reason.

LLMs don't just "learn" facts from their training data. They learn how to pretend to be thinking, they can mimic but not really comprehend. If there were facts in the training data, it can regurgitate them, but it doesn't actually know which facts apply to which subjects, or when to not make some up.

It's not the exact same problems humans have. It's completely different. Marketers and hucksters just use anthropomorphic terminology to hype their dysfunctional programs.

Right? In all science fiction, artificial intelligence starts out better than us, and the only question is whether it can capture some idiosyncratic element of “being human.” Instead, AI has started out dumber than us, and we’re all standing around saying “uh what is this good for?”

Instead they are taught from things like Facebook and the thing formerly known as Twitter.

Imagine they would teach in our schools to inform yourself about all the important things, and therefore you should read as many toilet walls as newspapers...

Intelligence is whatever does the job and gets it done well.

Even people hallucinate. Under your definition intelligence doesn't exist

What you can do is try to filter out the garbage, but it’s basically trying to find gold in food waste.

Remember the game people used to play that was something like "type my girlfriend is and then let your phone keyboards auto suggestion take it from there?" LLMs are that.

An LLM once explained to me that it didn't know, it simulated an answer. I found that descriptive.

I was wondering, are people working on networks that train to create a modular model of the world, in order to understand it / predict events in the world?

I imagine that that is basically what our brains do.

They do have internal concepts though: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yzGDwpRBx6TEcdeA5/a-chess-gpt-linear-emergent-world-representation

Probably not of what a human is, but thought process is needed for better text generarion and is therefore emergent in their neural net

all we know about ourselves is what's in our memories. the way normal writing or talking works is just picking what words sound best in order

Yeah, I try to make this point as often as I can. The notion that AI hallucinates only wrong answers really misleads people about how these programs actually work. It couches it in terms of human failings rather than really getting at the underlying flaw in the whole concept.

LLMs are a really interesting area of research, but they never should have made it out of the lab. The fact that they did is purely because all science operates in the service of profit now. Imagine if OpenAI were able to rely on government funding instead of having to find a product to sell.

First of all I agree with your point that it is all hallucination.

However I think a brain in a vat could confirm information about the world with direct sensors like cameras and access to real-time data, as well as the ability to talk to people and determine things like who was trustworthy. In reality we are brains in vats, we just have a fairly common interface that makes consensus reality possible.

The thing that really stops LLMs from being able to make judgements about what is true and what is not is that they cannot make any judgements whatsoever. Judging what is true is a deeply contextual and meaning-rich question. LLMs cannot understand context.

I think the moment an AI can understand context is the moment it begins to gain true sentience, because a capacity for understanding context is definitionally unbounded. Context means searching beyond the current information for further information. I think this context barrier is fundamental, and we won't get truth-judging machines until we get actually-thinking machines.

One can have an expert system assisted by ML for classification. But that's not an LLM.

At least LLMs will. The only real fix we've seen was running it through additional specialized LLMs to try to massage out errors, but that just increases costs and scale for marginally low results.

I'm sure Tesla can do it within the decade! /s

Unless Apple became the first to figure out how, then they suddenly have a huge leg up on the rest. Which is kinda how Apple has been making their bread for most of their successes in my lifetime

Yeah, just pull the plug. The amount of time we waste talking about this shit for these assholes to play another round of monopoly is unbelievable

I mean companies world wide just jumped in the AI bandwagon like a lot of people did with the NFT one. Mostly because AI actually has solid use cases and can make a big difference in broad situations.

Just since people are just slapping AI in everything it's gonna end up being another fad to raise stock prices, like firing people last year.

Let's just hope when all of the hype blows over and the general public thinks of AI as the marketing buzzword that never works quite right we'll keep AI in the things it's actually useful for

I would expect that Apple has hired some of those experts and they told him.

These programs are averaging massive amounts of data into a massive averaging function. There's no way that a human could ever understand what's going on inside that kind function. Humans can't hold millions of weights/etc in their head and comprehend what it means. Otherwise, if humans could do this, there would be no point in doing this kind of statistics with computers.

Because it's all a corporation and a huge part of the corporate capitalist system is infinite growth. They want returns, BIG ones. When? Right the fuck now. How do you do that? Well AI would turn the world upside down like the dot-com boom. So they dump tons of money into AI. So..... it's the AI done? Oh no no no, we're at machine leaning AI is pretty far down the road actually, what we're firing the AI department heads and releasing this machine leaning software as 100% all the way done AI?

It's all the same reasons section 8 housing and low cost housing don't work under corporate capitalism. It's profitable to take government money, it's profitable to have low rent apartments. That's not the problem, the problem is THEY NEED THE GROWTH NOW NOW NOW!!!! If you have a choice between owning a condo where you have high wage renters, and you add another $100 to rent every year, you get more profit faster. No one wants to invest in a 10% increase over 5 years if the can invest in 12% over 4 years. So no one ever invests in low rent or section 8 housing.

The AI is confidently wrong, that's the whole problem. If there was an easy way to know if it could be wrong we wouldn't have this discussion

Of course you are getting downvoted, because you are right and not being a reactionary douche like your average lemmizen.