LangChain for Life Science

Chapter 3. Hallucinations and RAG Systems

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In the era where LLMs have become incredibly sophisticated, their outputs often appear so accurate and insightful that it is easy to start trusting them implicitly. I recently had a debate with a colleague on a scientific topic I am quite familiar with. All my arguments were “double-checked” by consulting ChatGPT, which is trained on data from various forums and Wikipedia. LLMs can indeed generate coherent narratives, provide detailed explanations, and even mimic human-like reasoning. However, this trust can be misleading. You may notice occasional inaccuracies or outright fabrications as you continue digging deeper into their responses. The unsettling fact is that these powerful tools, despite their impressive capabilities, sometimes mess up the facts and invent events that never happened, basically hallucinating.

Hallucinations, Their Causes and Consequences

Chapter 2 looked into how ...