3 ms·

We are going to need better retrieval methods as LLMs augment and generate more content on the internet.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I hear this a lot but I don’t know I fully buy it. The LLM have no agency of their own, so someone has to instruct it what to write about. For instance say you’re writing a new article about a Trump trial. You can’t simply ask it for an article about the trial. It doesn’t “know” as it’s new knowledge never written about before. You have to tell it the situation and the specifics gained from first hand experience. That knowledge is encoded in the LLM output. Future LLM being fed that textual information gain the knowledge the human entered and the LLM encoded. The value the LLM provides in this scenario is simply the language and grammar around knowledge a human provided. It didn’t generate any content whatsoever. The human did that. Similarly a human with a calculator generates numbers but the intent and meaning is provided by the human. The future “LLM all talking to each other” I think doesn’t actually exist, until perhaps multimodal AIs can describe the environment around them. But even then, it’s not an echo chamber because they’re encoding the unfolding of events and time that exists outside the LLM in a way future LLM can encode it.
- MereInterest 3y ago
  LLMs can’t create true statements about events not described in their training data, but that’s no reason to assume that they won’t be increasingly prominent on the internet. Advertisement views pay the same whether they are next to true information or merely true-sounding information.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    That’s not actually true, high quality news sites make better returns on views and click throughs hence can charge more for advertising. What makes them high quality is both the quality of writing, which is commoditized by LLM, but also the quality of the fact finding and truthfulness. LLM creators don’t have to train their models with known cesspools of SEO garbage pumped out to dupe search engine users whether by humans or machine. Just because a news paper is entirely written by an editorially controlled LLM fed story outlines by reporters doesn’t make the news any less quality than one artisanally crafted by human writers - the facts are what matter, not that the prose was constructed by a writer. In that case, the news as written by the LLM encode facts provided by a human, and would make high quality material for another LLM. I would anticipate there will be LLM who specialize in high quality source material, hence I don’t think an internet of material written by LLM with human guidance would produce any worse LLM than the ones made today.

I hear this a lot but I don’t know I fully buy it. The LLM have no agency of their own, so someone has to instruct it what to write about. For instance say you’re writing a new article about a Trump trial. You can’t simply ask it for an article about the trial. It doesn’t “know” as it’s new knowledge never written about before. You have to tell it the situation and the specifics gained from first hand experience. That knowledge is encoded in the LLM output. Future LLM being fed that textual information gain the knowledge the human entered and the LLM encoded. The value the LLM provides in this scenario is simply the language and grammar around knowledge a human provided. It didn’t generate any content whatsoever. The human did that. Similarly a human with a calculator generates numbers but the intent and meaning is provided by the human. The future “LLM all talking to each other” I think doesn’t actually exist, until perhaps multimodal AIs can describe the environment around them. But even then, it’s not an echo chamber because they’re encoding the unfolding of events and time that exists outside the LLM in a way future LLM can encode it.

MereInterest 3y ago
LLMs can’t create true statements about events not described in their training data, but that’s no reason to assume that they won’t be increasingly prominent on the internet. Advertisement views pay the same whether they are next to true information or merely true-sounding information.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  That’s not actually true, high quality news sites make better returns on views and click throughs hence can charge more for advertising. What makes them high quality is both the quality of writing, which is commoditized by LLM, but also the quality of the fact finding and truthfulness. LLM creators don’t have to train their models with known cesspools of SEO garbage pumped out to dupe search engine users whether by humans or machine. Just because a news paper is entirely written by an editorially controlled LLM fed story outlines by reporters doesn’t make the news any less quality than one artisanally crafted by human writers - the facts are what matter, not that the prose was constructed by a writer. In that case, the news as written by the LLM encode facts provided by a human, and would make high quality material for another LLM. I would anticipate there will be LLM who specialize in high quality source material, hence I don’t think an internet of material written by LLM with human guidance would produce any worse LLM than the ones made today.