Think of the billions of numbers inside a large language model as a vast spreadsheet that captures the statistical likelihood that certain words will appear alongside certain other words.

Wonder what is really powering your ChatGPT or Gemini chatbots? This is everything you need to know about large language models.

But when a large language model scores well on such tests, it is not clear at all what has been measured. Is it evidence of actual understanding? A mindless statistical trick? Rote repetition?

It looks like a bug, but it’s just the LLM doing what it always does. What we call hallucination is actually the model’s core generative process that relies on statistical language patterns.