Two angles for thought. 1) If an LLM says, "I don't know" its underlying data said it as well. 2) Many system prompts use something along the lines of, "you are a helpful assistant" which may be counter to stating something like, "I don't know."/has a low likelihood of appearing after the system prompt.

Regardless the frontier model considered, we're certainly in a "know-it-all" era.

Maybe the sort of introspective prompt-response is difficult to implement when it could limit/contaminate future improvement. I speculate it's easier to correct a "confidently incorrect" model than a "I don't know" model. A confidently incorrect model response >=0% correct over a 0% correct (I don't know).

Maybe "I don't know" is a model cognito hazard of sorts when many queries can lead back to the response. Maybe future Turing tests will use this sort of introspective evaluation. Who knows? I don't :)

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spwa4 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> 1) If an LLM says, "I don't know" its underlying data said it as well.

Nope. Emergent behavior exists and at this point dominates LLM behavior. Most of the stuff LLMs say they never learned (they are, always, imitating many different sources at the same time)

... which imho is exactly what humans do.

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chrisjj an hour ago | parent [-]

> Emergent behavior exists and at this point dominates LLM behavior.

Better to say emergent behavior exists and at this point dominates gulled LLM users' behavior.

LLM output is not emergent behaviour. Its simply word prediction with some randomness.

	▲	Marha01 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Its simply word prediction with some randomness. Word prediction with some randomness can lead to emergent behavior, depending on the specifics (complexity and scale) of the used prediction logic.
	▲	spwa4 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> LLM output is not emergent behaviour. Its simply word prediction with some randomness. And this very claim is "simply" the result of a neurotranmitter-moderated Natrium - Potassium ion cascade across a semipermeable membrane.