An Unexpected Discovery
The founder of Acurai once worked on an AI project to seamlessly merge the contents of multiple documents together. When doing so, he discovered that the LLM would occasionally conflate the contents of one document with another when the documents shared words in common. An epiphany struck. Could this be the root cause of AI hallucinations? Through manually examining hundreds of hallucinations, he confirmed that removing the shared words eliminated the hallucinations—100% of the time.