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The problem with this claim is it’s objectively not how OpenAI works. First, they pay contractors to do RLHF so that’s a limited new source of data. More import

The problem with this claim is it’s objectively not how OpenAI works. First, they pay contractors to do RLHF so that’s a limited new source of data. More importantly, they have a huge user base generating new content (conversations) and rating it too! I think one could be suspicious of including responses generated by the model, but the user generated text from ChatGPT is not going to be AI generated, so you grow your corpus that way. If you just slurp all AI content sure, you get the collapse this paper talks about. But if you only ingest the upvoted conversations (which could still be a lot of data, and is also a moat by the way) what then? The other reason I find this line of argument overly pessimistic is we haven’t seriously started to build products where this gen of LLMs converse with humans in speech; similar opportunities to curate large datasets there too. Finally, there is no reason OpenAI cannot just hire domain experts to converse with the models, or otherwise build highly curated datasets that increase the average quality. They have billions of dollars to throw at GPT-5; they could hire hundreds of top tier engineers, mathematicians, economists, traders, or whatever, full time for years just debating and tutoring GPT-4 to build the next dataset. The idea that slurping the internet is the only option seems pretty unimaginative to me.

istjohn 3y ago
They wouldn't be able to finance the creation of new content that would constitute more than a rounding error compared to all the writing produced by humanity in all of history that they got for almost nothing. The opportunities for new training data are in non-public documents like internal corporate and government documents and communication and private text messages and chat transcripts. After that, you have non-text sources like video and audio. Imagine paying people a few bucks per week to use an app that records all audio all the time, anonymizes it, and incorporates it into a training corpus, or paying for access to home security cam footage and audio. McDonalds could create a new revenue stream by recording all human speach and activity in every one of its kitchens and dining rooms.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  Do they have to start over from scratch or can they use all of the data they currently have and then either add more scraped data that has been curated by humans or just outright buy data that isn’t publicly available. Considering that RLHF took GPT-3 from a text completion model to an instruction following chat bot, you could use expert feedback to fine tune the model in whatever domains you wanted or a mixture of domains to produce an even more generally capable model.
moonchild 3y ago
> there is no reason OpenAI cannot just hire domain experts to converse with the models If it didn't work for cyc...
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
> But if you only ingest the upvoted conversations given how prolific bot farms/karma farms/etc are, you might still end up in the same spot with this criteria.

istjohn 3y ago

They wouldn't be able to finance the creation of new content that would constitute more than a rounding error compared to all the writing produced by humanity in all of history that they got for almost nothing. The opportunities for new training data are in non-public documents like internal corporate and government documents and communication and private text messages and chat transcripts. After that, you have non-text sources like video and audio. Imagine paying people a few bucks per week to use an app that records all audio all the time, anonymizes it, and incorporates it into a training corpus, or paying for access to home security cam footage and audio. McDonalds could create a new revenue stream by recording all human speach and activity in every one of its kitchens and dining rooms.

throwuwu 3y ago
Do they have to start over from scratch or can they use all of the data they currently have and then either add more scraped data that has been curated by humans or just outright buy data that isn’t publicly available. Considering that RLHF took GPT-3 from a text completion model to an instruction following chat bot, you could use expert feedback to fine tune the model in whatever domains you wanted or a mixture of domains to produce an even more generally capable model.

moonchild 3y ago

> there is no reason OpenAI cannot just hire domain experts to converse with the models If it didn't work for cyc...

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

> But if you only ingest the upvoted conversations given how prolific bot farms/karma farms/etc are, you might still end up in the same spot with this criteria.