4 ms·

"I think the truth is we’ve written all that ever needs to be written" I highly doubt this statement. How useful would ChatGPT 4 be if it was trained only on

"I think the truth is we’ve written all that ever needs to be written" I highly doubt this statement. How useful would ChatGPT 4 be if it was trained only on data up to 2013? (Assuming the total amount of data it was trained on was the same) Would it be like talking to a human who was sitting in their basement for the past decade? I am not sure how useful that would be to me.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
That’s fair - current events aren’t covered. However, my point wasn’t about salience of facts but language ability.
randcraw 3y ago
And if the data that LLMs have trained on is only simple social conversation, what level of intelligence will that begat? No nobel-laureate-level 'thinking' is going to arise from training text composed of obvious or trivial statements -- which surely compose 99% of ChatGPT's training material. These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. If we want higher level cognition from future LLMs, where will such deep thought come from? Surely not the training data used now: email, tweets, reddit, mass media, etc. GIGO indeed. Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading.
- xp84 3y ago
  It does seem like limiting new training material to only good quality information would be prudent rather than slurping up entire GPT-produced spam sites. Sure, LLMs will have been used to refine and assist much of it from here on out, but I'd like to think theses, newspapers, etc won't just be produced entirely by unsupervised robots and not even fact-checked. If that's the case we'll have bigger problems.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Well, I’d say that given LLM have no agency, if a Nobel laureate uses LLMs to produce their text with their direct guidance of the concepts to convey and details. I think LLM aren’t just useful as oracles but as calculators for writing. To that end I don’t find math done using matlab is any less useful than artisanal hand made math. Likewise text constrained and informed by a human mind with novel information but presented by a LLM- is it inferior?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. I don't think it's any more rare now than it ever was. It's always been rare. > Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading. Sturgeon's Law is immutable and timeless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
throwuwu 3y ago
Once it can read, has a broad vocabulary and can reason enough to synthesize information from what is given then you don’t need to train it any further. We’re at that point now. Everything going forward is just engineering, even just finding ways to increase the context length will allow these models to work with any data available. OpenAI is very publicly working on that and so is Anthropic. You can also apply some finesse and combine the model with external tools like search and databases or custom built APIs, practically everyone and their dog is experimenting with this approach. So even if no better models are made, which seems unlikely to be the case, we’ll be utilizing the current generation in all kinds of ways from here on out.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "...and can reason enough..." Are we actually at this point now? I am less confident than you are...
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    I use it every day to help solve problems, that’s enough for me to say it has some level of reasoning ability. Not claiming its perfect but it’s better than some people I know.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  > Once it can read, has a broad vocabulary and can reason enough to synthesize information from what is given then you don’t need to train it any further And what is it going to read? How will it distinguish anything it reads today from AI generated content? Don't you see you've just set up the exact same circumstance that the article talks about?
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    Do you know the difference between training and inference? If not, this conversation isn’t going anywhere.
    - 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

That’s fair - current events aren’t covered. However, my point wasn’t about salience of facts but language ability.

randcraw 3y ago

And if the data that LLMs have trained on is only simple social conversation, what level of intelligence will that begat? No nobel-laureate-level 'thinking' is going to arise from training text composed of obvious or trivial statements -- which surely compose 99% of ChatGPT's training material. These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. If we want higher level cognition from future LLMs, where will such deep thought come from? Surely not the training data used now: email, tweets, reddit, mass media, etc. GIGO indeed. Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading.

xp84 3y ago
It does seem like limiting new training material to only good quality information would be prudent rather than slurping up entire GPT-produced spam sites. Sure, LLMs will have been used to refine and assist much of it from here on out, but I'd like to think theses, newspapers, etc won't just be produced entirely by unsupervised robots and not even fact-checked. If that's the case we'll have bigger problems.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Well, I’d say that given LLM have no agency, if a Nobel laureate uses LLMs to produce their text with their direct guidance of the concepts to convey and details. I think LLM aren’t just useful as oracles but as calculators for writing. To that end I don’t find math done using matlab is any less useful than artisanal hand made math. Likewise text constrained and informed by a human mind with novel information but presented by a LLM- is it inferior?
JohnFen 3y ago
> These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. I don't think it's any more rare now than it ever was. It's always been rare. > Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading. Sturgeon's Law is immutable and timeless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

throwuwu 3y ago

Once it can read, has a broad vocabulary and can reason enough to synthesize information from what is given then you don’t need to train it any further. We’re at that point now. Everything going forward is just engineering, even just finding ways to increase the context length will allow these models to work with any data available. OpenAI is very publicly working on that and so is Anthropic. You can also apply some finesse and combine the model with external tools like search and databases or custom built APIs, practically everyone and their dog is experimenting with this approach. So even if no better models are made, which seems unlikely to be the case, we’ll be utilizing the current generation in all kinds of ways from here on out.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"...and can reason enough..." Are we actually at this point now? I am less confident than you are...
- throwuwu 3y ago
  I use it every day to help solve problems, that’s enough for me to say it has some level of reasoning ability. Not claiming its perfect but it’s better than some people I know.
mvdtnz 3y ago
> Once it can read, has a broad vocabulary and can reason enough to synthesize information from what is given then you don’t need to train it any further And what is it going to read? How will it distinguish anything it reads today from AI generated content? Don't you see you've just set up the exact same circumstance that the article talks about?
- throwuwu 3y ago
  Do you know the difference between training and inference? If not, this conversation isn’t going anywhere.
  - 3y ago