OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more

[highplainsdem]

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-models-hallucinate-more/

OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models.

Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s best-performing systems. Historically, each new model has improved slightly in the hallucination department, hallucinating less than its predecessor. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for o3 and o4-mini.

-snip-

OpenAI found that o3 hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, the company’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a model’s knowledge about people. That’s roughly double the hallucination rate of OpenAI’s previous reasoning models, o1 and o3-mini, which scored 16% and 14.8%, respectively. O4-mini did even worse on PersonQA — hallucinating 48% of the time.

Third-party testing by Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab, also found evidence that o3 has a tendency to make up actions it took in the process of arriving at answers. In one example, Transluce observed o3 claiming that it ran code on a 2021 MacBook Pro “outside of ChatGPT,” then copied the numbers into its answer. While o3 has access to some tools, it can’t do that.

-snip-

[SheltieLover]

1. I wish ai were illegal.

[cachukis]

2. That says a lot. AI draws from our society for

answers. Perhaps part of our social consciousness is a bit off.