# Hallucinations made entertainment a natural early use

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/hallucinations-made-entertainment-a-natural-early-use/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Noam Shazeer](https://realalpha.app/builders/noam-shazeer/) · OpenAI; co-author of the Transformer · Designed multi-head attention in the Transformer, and worked on sparse Mixture of Experts, Mesh-TensorFlow and T5.
- Host: [Jacob Effron](https://realalpha.app/people/jacob-effron/) · Partner, Redpoint · Growth investor in Abridge, Ramp and Physical Intelligence; ex-Flatiron Health.
- Show: Unsupervised Learning
- Episode: [Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae: Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/), Mar 17, 2025
- Moment: 58:15 to 1:00:30 of the episode (2 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/hallucinations-made-entertainment-a-natural-early-use/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/?t=3495

## Quote

> “nobody's figured out how to make this thing not hallucinate. So people are going to use it for applications where **hallucination is actually a feature**, such as entertainment.”
> — [Noam Shazeer](https://realalpha.app/builders/noam-shazeer/) at [1:00:00](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/?t=3600) · Unsupervised Learning

## Takeaways

1. Character AI began as a broad way to explore LLM uses.
2. Users gravitated to entertainment while models still hallucinated.
3. In some applications, unreliability can be part of the appeal.

## About this segment

Noam Shazeer says Character AI began as a broad way to explore LLM uses, then saw entertainment emerge while models still hallucinated. Unreliability could fit role-play better than high-stakes tasks.

From “Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae: Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI”, Mar 17, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[58:19](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/?t=3499) kind of building out character and yeah a lot about kind of that product space of what like you know uh ai companions and the ability for folks to to chat with all sorts of different kinds of people what do you you know what do you feel about where that space is today what kind of like problems, do you feel like we still need to solve there? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the main reason I left Google to start Character was I thought that the biggest thing that the LLM industry could use was an application where anybody can go and interact with LLMs and use them and discover use cases that were that were good for them.

[59:00](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/?t=3540) And, you know, because this was before, you know, before ChatGPT launched, before Gemini launched. So, I mean, mission accomplished. Everyone's out there talking to OLMs now. But, which is kind of different from how things are now. I guess the other thing was, you know, going into character, we were not really focused on, hey, this is going to be uh an entertainment product or something or something else we kind of just went in with an open mind and we're like okay um you know we're going to just put this out there in a general way we're going to help um help people conceptualize this as you know okay this thing can um you know take on different personas meaning it's a you know it's a very very general technology see what you can make it do.

[59:57](https://realalpha.app/v/atMRWzgHEGg/?t=3597) And definitely, we found a lot of people are using it for entertainment, I think partially because at that point in the technology, like, OK, nobody's figured out how to make this thing not hallucinate. So people are going to use it for applications where hallucination is actually a feature, such as entertainment. then, you know, that's, you know, I think that's worked pretty well. I know a lot of people like using character.