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LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This
arxiv.orgAs Large Language Models become more ubiquitous across domains, it becomes important to examine their inherent limitations critically. This work argues that hallucinations in language models are not just occasional errors but an inevitable feature of these systems. We demonstrate that hallucinations stem from the fundamental mathematical and logical structure of LLMs. It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms. Our analysis draws on computational theory and Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which references the undecidability of problems like the Halting, Emptiness, and Acceptance Problems. We demonstrate that every stage of the LLM process-from training data compilation to fact retrieval, intent classification, and text generation-will have a non-zero probability of producing hallucinations. This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.



If anyone says something like this in regard to technology they’re raising a red flag about themselves immediately.
No it is not. It is the same as saying you can’t have coal energy production without production of CO2. At most, you can capture that CO2 and do something with it instead of releasing to the atmosphere.
You can have energy production without CO2. Like solar or wind, but that is not coal energy production. It’s something else. In order to remove CO2 from coal energy production, we had to switch to different technologies.
In the same way, if you want to not have hallucinations, you should move away from LLMs.
What computers do now was considered “impossible” once. What cars do now was considered “impossible” once. That’s my point - saying absolutes like “impossible” in tech is a giant red flag.
I’ll remember this post when someone manages to make a human fly by tieing a cow to their feet.
One word:
Trebuchet.
Technological impossibilities exist all the time. They’re one of, if not the biggest, drivers behind engineering and design.
This isn’t one of those times. We’re just scratching the surface of AI. Anyone saying anything absolute like it’s impossible for them to not hallucinate is saying “No one should listen to me”.
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