this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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The important thing to remember is that it actually has zero access to information, because that's not how LLMs work.
At their core, they're vector databases, and they're trying to probabilistically come up with the next most likely token in a stream of tokens found in the DB. You can manipulate the stream by injecting text such as the content of existing files (which becomes more tokens) into the stream, but it never actually understands any of it.
That's why hallucinations are inherently unavoidable. It's really all just hallucinations. It's just that you can sometimes get useful text from their hallucinations if they happen to comport with reality.
This is crazy lol they obviously have access to information.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, not if by "information" you mean semantic content that a mind can process. What they have are vector fields (essentially just numbers) with statistically more or less likely relationships.
If I say, "take me out to the ballgame" to an LLM, the tokens representing the words in the next verse of the song are statistically "close" in the vector database, so it's likely to generate them. But that doesn't mean it actually knows the lyrics... or even has those lyrics recorded in a regular database anywhere.
That's why they hallucinate. The model determines that the next token is something nonsensical, but it has no way of understanding that it has made a mistake. In a sense, it actually hasn't made a mistake. It's done exactly what it's designed to do. It's just that in the case of hallucinations, its output isn't useful.
Is that required?
Do you have those lyrics recorded in a regular database in your head?
Of course, LLMs are more "human" if they occasionally mis-remember the lyrics...