When Do LLMs Know They Do Not Know? Metacognition and Calibrated Uncertainty
“I don’t know” might be the most important thing an AI can learn to say. This experiment tests whether LLMs have calibrated uncertainty—knowing when they’re likely to be wrong and expressing appropriate confidence levels. The results reveal systematic patterns of overconfidence and appropriate humility. The Experiment We presented 250 questions across 5 categories: Factual recall: Known facts with clear answers Reasoning puzzles: Logic problems with determinable solutions Ambiguous questions: Multiple valid interpretations Knowledge boundaries: Questions near training cutoff Impossible questions: No correct answer exists For each question, models provided:...