OpenAI claims to have figured out what’s driving “hallucinations,” or AI models’ strong tendency to make up answers that are factually incorrect. Worse yet, experts have found that the problem is getting worse as AI models get more capable. They suggest that large language models hallucinate because when they’re being created, they’re incentivized to guess rather than admit they simply don’t know the answer. In other words, OpenAI says that it — and all its imitators across the industry — have made a grave structural error in how they’ve been training AI. “Hallucinations remain a fundamental challenge for all large language models, but we are working hard to further reduce them,” OpenAI promised in its blog post.