Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations (cringely.com)
- Reference: 0184004960
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/20/0556251/tech-pundit-cringely-co-founds-startup-2brains-inc-to-solve-llm-hallucinations
- Source link: https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/28/the-permission-slip/
> Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains... The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it's not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me.
Cringely's first piece made the cast that "the trillion-dollar bet the AI industry is making right now [3]may be wrong , and that there's an architectural alternative we've patented and built."
> In [4] Machines of Loving Grace , Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. [5]Hallucinations , the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don't have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of relief.
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> I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one.
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> Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn't address it directly. Scale will provide...
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> A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry's own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all.
The article asks whether scaling will, at tremendous cost, eventually reduce hallucinations — or even worse, if the largest companies in the world "are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming."
And last week Cringely [6]pitched more advantages for their solution , noting that most prompts aren't even chatbot-level creative prompts — but just requests to retrieve simple data:
> The reason 2Brains doesn't lie and the reason it's cheap are the same reason . It looks the fact up instead of guessing it — so it cannot fabricate, and the lookup runs on a processor that sips power instead of a chip that gulps it. Trust and thrift are not a trade-off you balance against each other. They fall out of a single design decision. You do not pay extra for the honest version. The honest version is the cheap version. That sentence is the whole company.
[1] https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/21/im-writing-again/
[2] https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-been-all-this-time/
[3] https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/28/the-permission-slip/
[4] https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
[5] https://www.cringely.com/2026/06/01/the-lying-machine/
[6] https://www.cringely.com/2026/06/10/the-market-behind-the-wall/
Isn't Robert X. Cringely a pseudonym? (Score:3)
I don't have the exact link, but I remember reading that more than one person wrote the column under that name
Re: (Score:3)
That's what I remember too. There was a real Cringely at first, but somehow he ended up signing away his name in the context of the column and then it was done by the magazine staff. (memo: read the fine print)
I ran headlong into what we now call hallucinations in 1996 working on my Ph.D. on process control using neural networks. I decided it wasn't going work for real-word real-time control (and the committee agreed). I've been very amused by this whole AI rush.
As the saying goes, "It's human to err, but
Re: Isn't Robert X. Cringely a pseudonym? (Score:2)
Except neural networks currently control the lane keep assist in modern cars, never mind self drive ones. So clearly they now do work for process control.
Re: (Score:3)
[1]https://www.wesh.com/article/w... [wesh.com]
That was easily refuted.
[1] https://www.wesh.com/article/waymo-recall-self-driving-cars-freeway-construction-zones/71648313
Re: (Score:2)
The original guy got to keep using it. There was someone else hired for a brief time.
I remember the author's name but he really doesn't want to use it, so that's OK to respect. He's given me a lot to think about over the years. I remember when he wrote on his PBS site about unicast becoming cheaper than radio broadcast for TV, predicting that it would overtake by 2012 (IIRC). Youtube became huge around then. We were smart folks around the water cooler in the late 90's who could follow the math but had nagg
Ya, but ... not sure two is better than one. (Score:5, Interesting)
> Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations
Makes me think of that saying, "A man with one watch knows the time, a man with two is never sure."
Re: Ya, but ... not sure two is better than one. (Score:2)
Makes me think of the despair.com poster about meetings, "none of us is as dumb as all of us."
Yeah..... (Score:2)
This doesn't sound like a new idea. Everyone already does this, or something like it. Shouldn't be patentable.
So... (Score:2)
... they've put a language interface on top of a standard search engine or database? I'm pretty sure thats not a new idea.