Why LLMs hallucinate | Yann LeCun and Lex Fridman?

Imagine you're playing 20 questions with a friend who sometimes guesses wrong, that’s like why big language models (LLMs) make up answers they shouldn’t.

Yann LeCun and Lex Fridman are talking about how these large language models can hallucinate, which means they say things that aren’t true, just like if your friend guessed the answer was “a dinosaur” when it was actually “a cat.”

LLMs are like super-smart kids who’ve read lots of books. When you ask them a question, they try to remember what they've learned and put together an answer, kind of like solving a puzzle.

But sometimes they get confused, especially if the question is tricky or unfamiliar. It’s like if someone asked your friend, “What's blue and has stripes?” and your friend said “a zebra!” when it was actually “a blue train.” They’re not being mean, they're just making an educated guess based on what they know.

Sometimes the LLM doesn’t have enough information to answer a question. So instead of saying, “I don’t know,” it makes up something that sounds reasonable, like your friend guessing “a dinosaur” when you asked about a cat.

That’s why they hallucinate, they’re not being lazy or sneaky; they're just trying their best with the clues they have!