Just one idea for making a positive impact while meeting amazing communities of folks: Invest in early stage climate startups (and not just software ones). They’re struggling and they’re building stuff that we’ll desperately need to survive.
This gets at the heart of the problem. It doesn’t produce the wrong tokens. The tokens are right. It’s the data that was “wrong”. Or at least it was weighted “incorrectly” (according to the judge living outside the data with their own context they decide is true)
If you feed AI conspiracy theories and then it tells you Elvis is still alive, that’s an input problem not an algorithm problem.
Now, getting to an AI that doesn’t “hallucinate” is a little more complicated than simply filtering out “conspiracy theories” from data, but IMhO it’s not many orders of magnitudes away. Far from insurmountable in a couple Moores law cycles.
I think human brains operate on the same principal of divining next tokens. We’re just judging AI for not saying the tokens we like best even though we feed AI garbage in and don’t tell AI what it should even care about. “AI doesn’t live here” it wasn’t born “here.”
Someday soon we’ll probably give AI guard rails to respond considering the context of society (the programmers version of society), and it will probably hallucinate less than most humans.
Human brains are also just picking tokens tho. A beautiful illusion of insight and thought in the chaos noise of information. But out of the chaos, the emergence of thought is real. It’s just not exclusive to humans.
I mean… even magicians (mentalists) can reliably hack humans into generating the next token they want you to generate.
And humans habitually stray from the “truth” too. It’s always seemed to me that getting AI to be more accurate isn’t a math problem, it’s getting AI to “care” about what is true - aka better defining what truth is- aka what sources should be cited with what weights.
We can’t even keep humans in society from believing in the stupidest conspiracy theories. When humans get their knowledge from sources indiscriminately, they also parrot stupid shit that isn’t real.
Now enter Gödel’s incompleteness Theorem: there is no perfect tie between language and reality. Super interesting. But this isn’t the issue. Or at least it’s not more of an issue for robots than it is for humans.
If/when humans deliver “accurate” results in our dialogs, it’s because we’ve been trained to care about what is “accuracy” (as defined by society’s chosen sources)
Remember that AI “doesn’t live here.” It’s swimming in a mess of noisy context without guidance for what it should care about.
IMHO, as soon as we train AI to “care” at a basic level about what we culturally agree is “true” the hallucinations will diminish to be far smaller than the hallucinations of most humans.
I’m honestly not sure if that will be a good thing or the start of something horrifying.