Why Language Models Hallucinate

Even as language models become more capable, one challenge remains stubbornly hard to fully solve: hallucinations. A new OpenAI research paper⁠ argues that language models hallucinate because standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty.

Hallucinations remain a fundamental challenge for all large language models, but we are working hard to further reduce them. Hallucinations are plausible but false statements generated by language models. They can show up in surprising ways, even for seemingly straightforward questions.

Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty.

Read the article HERE.