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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.



Generally hallucinations are frequent in pure chatbots, ChatGPT and similar, because they are based on an own knowledge base and LLM, so, if they don’t know an answer, they invent it, based on their data set. Different are AI with web access, they don’t have an own knowledge base, retrieving their answers in realtime from webcontents, because of this with a similar reliability as traditional search engines, with the advantage that they find relevant sites which are related with the context of the question, listing sources and summarizing the contents in a direct answer, instead of 390.000 pages of sites, which have nothing to do with the question in the traditional keyword search. IMHO for me, the only AI apps which result usefull for normal users, as search assistant, not an chatbot which tell me BS.