Evaluating 35 open-weight models across three context lengths (32K, 128K, 200K), four temperatures, and three hardware platforms—consuming 172 billion tokens across more than 4,000 runs—we find that the answer is “substantially, and unavoidably.” Even under optimal conditions—best model, best temperature, temperature chosen specifically to minimize fabrication—the floor is non-zero and rises steeply with context length. At 32K, the best model (GLM 4.5) fabricates 1.19% of answers, top-tier models fabricate 5–7%, and the median model fabricates roughly 25%.
Aka being wrong, but with a fancy name!
When Cletus is wrong because he mixed up a dog and a cat when deacribing their behavior do we call it hallucinating? No.
if you have a lobby you get special names, look at the pharma industry who coined the term “discontinuation syndrome” for a simple “withdrawal”