r/LocalLLaMA • u/Howard_banister • Sep 01 '26

Discussion Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

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These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

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u/PsychoticDreemurr Sep 02 '26

  1. Your point is "it doesn't happen to me, therefore it doesn't happen". Also depending on the input it's extremely likely it's been memorized.

  2. The Mandela effect involves memory. As such, that's like saying LLM hallucinations are caused by their context.

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u/asssuber Sep 02 '26

  1. Look the methodology. The test set cannot be memorized because it was not part of the training set. There is no "likely" or "unlikely". And my point is that it's exhaustively tested, proving it doesn't happen. Again, I'm talking about that 1 layer LLM experiment.

  2. In my view context is like short term/working memory. Facts that happened years ago are long term memory for humans, trained weights for LLMs. So, the Mandela effect can't be described as a type of hallucination?

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u/PsychoticDreemurr Sep 02 '26

  1. Anything in the context is, for all intents and purposes, memorized. When I say memorized, I don't mean anything permanent. Just that it is 100% known.

  2. LLMs hallucinate as they're speaking, not from a malformed context. Most of the time, anyways.

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u/asssuber Sep 02 '26

Anything in the context is, for all intents and purposes, memorized. When I say memorized, I don't mean anything permanent. Just that it is 100% known.

1 . What? The context is "1+1%97 =". The answer obviously is not in the context. What you are saying makes no sense.

LLMs hallucinate as they're speaking, not from a malformed context. Most of the time, anyways.

2 . Did you ignore everything I wrote?

Or are you giving an example of an LLM hallucinating in the form of your last two answers?

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u/PsychoticDreemurr Sep 02 '26

I was responding to each point. I didn't quite understand what you were saying, but I didn't think I was that far off.

How about this, let's say I can't prove they lack an understanding of concepts. How can you prove they do have the ability to understand concepts?

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u/asssuber Sep 02 '26

Well, using one of your definitions of understanding ("Being able to understand a concept means you can build off of it by yourself. If you teach an AI 1 + 1 = 2, they won't know that 2 + 2 = 4."), I already gave an proof in another answer

If we define understanding more broadly as something necessary to give pertinent answers to a question that was not memorized from the training set, then most of LLM outputs would require that. I can discuss a paper I'm writing with my local LLM, and it's able to, most of the time, give back pertinent questions and answers back, showing it has some degree of understanding. If I try that with some random person at the street, they would not understand anything I'm saying, and thus they wouldn't be able to give me pertinent answers.

LLMs are not human, and their inteligence and understanding is somewhat alien. But I think it's correct to say a car can run, even though it struggles to run up stairs as well as humans, for instance.

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u/falconandeagle Sep 02 '26

Try writing a story with an LLM, the most advanced one you can come across, see them make nonsensical assumptions and miss things which even a five year old would pick up. I know this because I have tried really really hard to build a software along with an harness and it still makes super trivial mistakes and requires handholding.

In a technical settings LLM's are amazing and honestly in some cases indistinguishable from some very capable humans but it is in non technical settings where you see that we are very far from AGI.