Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations
Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations
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Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations
144 comments
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It's kind of funny how AI has the exact same problems some humans have.
I always thought AI wouldn't have that kind of problems, because they would be carefully fed accurate information.
Instead they are taught from things like Facebook and the thing formerly known as Twitter.
What an idiotic timeline we are in. LOL-
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Yeah it's the old garbage in, garbage out problem, the AI algorithms don't really understand what they are outputting.
I think at this point voice recognition and text generation AI would be more useful as something like a phone assistant. You could tell it complex things like "Mute my phone for the next 2 hours" or "Notify me if I receive an email from John Smith." Those sort of things could be easily done by AI algorithms that A) Understand your voice and B) Are programmed to know all the features of the OS. Hopefully with a known dataset like a phone OS there shouldn't be hallucination problems, the AI could just act as an OS concierge.
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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.
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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.
- Hands. Are your hands... Hands? Do they make sense?
- 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
- How did I get here? Where was I before this? Does the transition make sense?
- Mirrors. Are they accurate?
- Displays on digital devices. Do they look normal?
- 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.
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Also, check your cell phone. Despite how ubiquitous they are in our daily lives, I don't think I've seen a single cell phone in my dreams. Or any other phone, for that matter.
And now that I think about it, I've definitely had a dream of being in my living room where there's a TV, but I don't remember the TV actually being in the dream.
Weird.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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...
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I'm 100% sure they can't because what they call AI isn't intelligence.
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Even people hallucinate. Under your definition intelligence doesn't exist
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Wow whoosh. The point is that "AI" isn't actually "intelligent" like a human and thus can't "hallucinate" like an intelligent human.
All of this anthropomorphic terminology is just misleading marketing bullshit.
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"Hallucination" is an anthropomorphized term for what's happening. The actual cause is much simpler, there's no semantic distinction between true and false statements. Both are equally plausible as far as a language model is concerned, as long as it's semantically structured like an answer to the question being asked.
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This is some real "what else besides witches floats in water" ass-logic
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No, really, if you understood how the language models work, you would understand it's not really intelligence. We just tend to humanize it because that's what our brains do.
There's a lot of great articles that summarize how we got to this stage and it's pretty interesting. I'll try to update this post with a link later.
I think LLMs are useful (and fun) and have a place, but intelligence they are not.
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LLMs aren't even hallucinating thou. It's a euphamistic term to make it's limitations sound human like
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You mean we can't teach a bullshit machine to stop bullshitting? I'm shocked.
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What you can do is try to filter out the garbage, but it’s basically trying to find gold in food waste.
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It’s insane how many people already take AI as more capable/accurate than other medium. I’m not against AI, but I’m definitely against how much of a bubble of being worshipped that some people have it in.
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As others are saying it's 100% not possible because LLMs are (as Google optimistically describes) "creative writing aids", or more accurately, predictive word engines. They run on mathematical probability models. They have zero concept of what the words actually mean, what humans are, or even what they themselves are. There's no "intelligence" present except for filters that have been hand-coded in (which of course is human intelligence, not AI).
"Hallucinations" is a total misnomer because the text generation isn't tied to reality in the first place, it's just mathematically "what next word is most likely".
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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.
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An LLM once explained to me that it didn't know, it simulated an answer. I found that descriptive.
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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.
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Many attempts, some well-funded.
They have been successful in very limited domains. For example, the F-35 integrated sensor suite.
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Not really anything properly universal, but a lot of task specific models exists with integration with logic engines and similar stuff. Performance varies a lot.
You might want to take a look at wolfram alpha's plugin for chatgpt for something that's public
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Yeah I'm sure folks are working on it, but I'm not knowledgeable or qualified on the details.
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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
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That's not the whole story. "The dog swam across the ocean." is a grammatically valid sentence with correct word order. But you probably wouldn't write it because you have a concept of what a dog actually is and know its physiological limitations make the sentence ridiculous.
The LLMs don't have those kind of smarts. They just blindly mirror what we do. Since humans generally don't put those specific words together, the LLMs avoid it too, based solely on probability. If lots of people started making bold claims about oceanfaring canids (e.g. as a joke), then the LLMs would absolutely jump onboard with no critical thinking of their own.
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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
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Ok, maybe there's a possibility someday with that approach. But that doesn't reflect my understanding or (limited) experience with the major LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini) out in the wild today. Right now they confidently advise ingesting poison because it's grammatically sound and they found it on some BS Facebook post.
If ML engineers can design an internal concept of what constitutes valid information (a hard problem for humans, let alone machines) maybe there's hope.
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The problem is they have many different internal concepts with conflicting information and no mechanism for determining truthfulness or for accuracy or for pruning bad information, and will sample them all randomly when answering stuff
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Everything these AIs output is a hallucination. Imagine if you were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, completely cut off from the outside world, and only had your brain fed the text of all books and internet sites. You would hallucinate everything about them too. You would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t because you’d lack any epistemic tools for confirming your knowledge.
That’s the biggest reason why AIs will always be bullshitters as long as their disembodied software programs running on a server. At best they can be a brain in a vat which is a pure hallucination machine.
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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.
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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.
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I'm 100% sure he can't. Or at least, not from LLMs specifically. I'm not an expert so feel free to ignore my opinion but from what I've read, "hallucinations" are a feature of the way LLMs work.
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One can have an expert system assisted by ML for classification. But that's not an LLM.
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They can't. AI has hallucinations. Google has shown that AI can't even rely on external sources, either.
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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.
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If Apple can stop AI hallucination, any other AI company can also stop AI hallucination. Which is something they could have already done instead of making AI seem a joke on purpose. AI hallucinations are a sort of phenomena that nobody has control over. Why would Tim Cook have unique control over it?
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I'm sure Tesla can do it within the decade! /s
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You mean xAI?
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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
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Here's how you stop AI from hallucinating:
Turn it off.
Because everything they output is a hallucination. Just because sometimes those hallucinations are true to life doesn't mean jack shit. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
"Only feed it accurate information."
Even that doesn't work because it just mixes and matches every element of its input to generate a new, novel output. Which would inevitably be wrong.
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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
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Of course they can't. Any product or feature is only as good as the data underneath it. Training data comes from the internet, and the internet is full of humans. Humans make and write weird shit so so the data that the LLM ingests is weird, this creates hallucinations.
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Seeing these systems just making shit up when they're not sure on the answer is probably the closest they'll ever come to human behaviour.
We've invented the virtual politician.
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That's what it comes by not really understanding what you're doing. Most of the AI models I work with are the state of the art just because they happen to work.
In my case, when I solve a PDE using finite difference schemes, there are precise mathematical conditions that guarantee you if the method is going to be stable or not. When I do the same using AI, I can't tell if my method is going to work or not unless I run it. Moreover, I've had it sometimes fail and sometimes succeed.
It's just the way it is for now. Some clever people have to step in and sort things out, because our knowledge is not keeping up with technological resources.
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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
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AI interest has come and gone. Some decades ago, people would slap the AI label to expert systems. If we go further back, one would call AI to solving problems in blocks world. It's eventually going to fade away, just like all the previous waves did.
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Well yeah, its using the same dataset as MS copilot.
Spitting out inaccurate (I wish the media would stop feeding into calling it something that sounds less bad like hallucinations) answers is nothing something that will go away until the LLM gains the ability to decern context.
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I'm not exaggerating when I say there's only like a dozen true experts for generative AI on the planet and even they're not completely sure what's going on in that blackbox. And as far as I'm aware Tim Cook isn't even one of them. How would he know?
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I would expect that Apple has hired some of those experts and they told him.
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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.
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I doubt anyone can for as long as "AI" is synonymous with LLMs. LLMs are just inherently unreliable because of how they work.
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I don't know why they're trying to shove AI down our throats. They need to take their time, allow it to evolve.
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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.
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They could make Siri change its voice and Genmoji based on the degree of certainty of the response:
- Trust me: Arnold as Terminator 😎
- Eehhhh, could be bullshit: shrugging old man meme 🤷🏻♂️
- Just kiddin' here: whacky Jerry Lewis 🤪
They could sell different voice packages. Revive the ringtone market.
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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
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this paper tries to do that: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.04689
there are also several other techniques I think
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While it can’t “know” its own confidence level, it can distinguish between general knowledge (12” in 1’) and specialized knowledge that requires supporting sources.
At one point, I had a chatGPT memory designed for it to automatically provide sources for specialized knowledge and it did a pretty good job.
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Tim Cook..go take your meds and watch Price is Right
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To be 100 percent sure is a hallucination. Probably he tried to say that he is less than 80 percent sure.
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I only trust moguls and political figures that are 100% sure of everything. I really like the confidence and it makes me feel like they deserve big paychecks and special rights because they must be so smart to have have no room for the doubt like the rest of us spineless imps. This guy is displaying weakness and should be shamed!
I bet Tim Apple is going to fire his ass.
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That's like saying you can't be 100% sure you never have fake news at the top of search query results. It's just a fact.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Even Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t sure the company can fully stop AI hallucinations.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Cook said he would “never claim” that its new Apple Intelligence system won’t generate false or misleading information with 100 percent confidence.
These features will let you generate email responses, create custom emoji, summarize text, and more.
Recent examples of how AI can get things wrong include last month’s incident with Google’s Gemini-powered AI overviews telling us to use glue to put cheese on pizza or a recent ChatGPT bug that caused it to spit out nonsensical answers.
The voice assistant will turn to ChatGPT when it receives a question better suited for the chatbot, but it will ask for your permission before doing so.
In the demo of the feature shown during WWDC, you can see a disclaimer at the bottom of the answer that reads, “Check important info for mistakes.”
The original article contains 334 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 54%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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If you want to have good AI, you need to spend money and send your AI to college. Have real humans interact with it, correct it's logic, make sure it understands sarcasm and logical fallacies.
Or, you can go the cheap route: train it on 10 years of Reddit sh*tposts and hope for the best.
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Tim Apple
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Saying anything else would be lying
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Stupid headline, it's like Tim Cook saying he's not 100% sure Apple can stop batteries in their devices from exploding. You do as much as you can to prevent it but it might happen anyway because that's just how it is.
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He's only being honest for the sake of the shareholders.
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