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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.



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”.
Let me ask you this
Take a CPU designed in the last 80 years. Ask it to divide integer 1 by integer 2. Explain to me why the CPU hands back 0 and not 0.5.
Technical solutions do have fundamental limitations to them that cannot be overcome. That scenario plays out all the time. We didn’t overcome integer division by brute force, we acknowledged that the approach of having computers use integers for numbers is flawed and came up with a bunch of possible solutions until finally settling on IEEE754 and even then it still doesn’t handle all math correctly.
Blindly saying such issues can be overcome is, imho, the truly stupid statement