Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

interview Don't trust; verify. According to AI researcher Vishal Sikka, LLMs alone are limited by computational boundaries and will start to hallucinate when they push those boundaries. One solution? Companion bots that check their work.

“To expect that a model that has been trained on a certain amount of data will be able to do an arbitrarily large number of calculations which are reliable is a wrong assumption. This is the point of the paper,” said Sikka, CEO of Vianai Systems during a call this week to discuss that research.

Sikka is a towering figure in AI. He has a PhD in the subject from Stanford, where his student advisor was John McCarthy, the man who in 1955 coined the term “artificial intelligence.” Lessons Sikka learned from McCarthy inspired him to team up with his son and write a study, “Hallucination Stations: On Some Basic Limitations of Transformer-Based Language ...