Linear Digressions
Linear Digressions
Katie Malone
A Scientific Deep Dive into Overconfident LLMs: Interview with Kaitlyn Zhou (Cornell)
33 minutes Posted Aug 10, 2026 at 2:07 am.
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When a language model tells you it's absolutely certain, is it actually more likely to be right? Kaitlyn Zhou's research says: not necessarily — sometimes confident phrasing correlates with *worse* accuracy, echoing a very human Dunning-Kruger effect. In this conversation, Kaitlyn (soon an assistant professor at Cornell) walks through why LLMs talk this way in the first place — tracing the tendency back through training data and the RLHF annotation process, where it turns out humans don't love confidence so much as they punish uncertainty — and what that does to the person on the other end of the chat window, who turns out to rely on confident (and even flatly-stated) answers far more than they should. We also get into her newer work on voice cloning, and how a cloned voice can sound more "native" and more trustworthy than the real one it's based on.