3 ms·

Who wants to learn from anything less than the best sources? I've often thought that a search engine that indexes only the highest quality, probably hand-curat

Who wants to learn from anything less than the best sources? I've often thought that a search engine that indexes only the highest quality, probably hand-curated, sources would be highly desireable. I'm not really interested in learning from everyone about, for example, physics or history or climate change or the invasion of Ukraine; I only want the best. I'm not missing out, practically: there is far more than enough of the 'best' to consume all my time; there's a large opportunity cost to reading other things. Choosing the 'best' is somewhat subjective, but it is far better than arbitrarily or randomly choosing sources. LLMs, used for knowledge discovery and retrieval, would seem to benefit from the same sources.

javiramos 3y ago
With Perplexity [0] you can narrow you LLM interactions to only reference Academic articles or other high-quality sources. [0] https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/
- Tomte 3y ago
  Ignoring the question whether LLMs can produce the best, the idea wouldn‘t be to cite the best sources, but to train only on the best sources. A garbage hallucination with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy won‘t help anyone.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    On the other hand, given the query "facial recognition in paper wasps", Perplexity just gave not only an answer in accord with my prior understanding derived from reading in the field, but also surfaced a paper [1] published two months ago that I hadn't yet seen. I expected less, and I suspect a researcher could easily find gaps. But from the perspective an amateur autodidact, that's still a fairly impressive result. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918592117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918592117
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
porphyra 3y ago
That makes sense but the principle of "more data = more better" suggests that maybe training an LLM on all the possible data and then fine tuning it to only spit out the best answers might be better than only training it on only the best data to begin with.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  How will training it on false data, for example, result in better output?
vecinu 3y ago
This might be a naive question but how does one determine what "best" is for multiple subjects? Even in your example, physics and mathematics could be curated for "best" when dealing with equations and foundational knowledge that has been hardened over decades. For history, climate change of invasion of Ukraine, isn't that sensitive to bias, manipulation and interpretation? These are not exact sciences.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What do you think of how that was addressed in the GP?
- colechristensen 3y ago
  You have to spend quite a lot of time thinking about quality and values. It becomes impossible as the size of the “best slice” you’re seeking gets smaller (top half is much easier than top ten percent, etc) If your values are “everyone should agree with my opinions” you’ll have a garbage biased data set. There are other values though. Bias free is also impossible because having a definition of a perfectly neutral bias is itself a very strong bias.
- animal_spirits 3y ago
  "Best" will be chosen by the creators of software for specific application uses. Medical software will use the "best" medical LLM under the hood. Programming software (Copilot et. all) will use the "best" programming LLM. General purpose language models will probably still be used by the public when doing internet searches. Or, an idea that just popped into my head, use a classifier to determine which model can most accurately answer the user's query, and send the query off to that model for a response.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Reread the comment you responded to. We aren’t discussing the best LLM here but how to determine the best source.
- bigger_cheese 3y ago
robrenaud 3y ago
Diversity and quantity are important for LLM training. A search engine can index more than just "the best sources", and show results from the tail when no relevant matches are in the best sources. I would agree that with a softer restatement of your thesis though, I am sure there is a lot of diminishing marginal utility in search indexing broadly, especially as the web keeps getting more and more full of spam and nonsense. For pre-training LLMs, the quality/quantity/diversity story is more nuanced. They do seem to benefit a lot from quantity. For a fixed LLM training budget, the choice to train on the same high quality documents for more epochs, or to train on lower quality but unseen data is an interesting area of research. Empirically, the research finds that additional epochs on the same data starts to diminish after the 4th iteration. All the research I've read tends to have an all or nothing flavor to data selection. Either it makes it in, and gets processed the same number of times, or it doesn't get in at all. There is probably some juice in the middle ground, where high quality data gets 4x'ed, bad data is still eliminated, but the lesser but not terrible data gets in once.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Thanks for an informed response!
staplers 3y ago
a search engine that indexes only the highest quality Any for-profit search engine eventually loses quality as it succumbs to ad spend. It'd require subsidies to remain profit-neutral (skew towards quality). Think ycombinator and HN. Even a subscription model will eventually skew towards placating the masses with "dumbed down" content.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Even a subscription model will eventually skew towards placating the masses with "dumbed down" content. Accuracy and simplicity are not the same. I can see that most people won't want to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's take on Plato. But anyone can read the Associated Press rather than someone's misinfo on the topic. Cut out the latter.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Let's ban advertising and let the market sort out the price of search with that perverse incentive out of the way.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
> I've often thought that a search engine that indexes only the highest quality, probably hand-curated, sources would be highly desireable That's what I miss about the old internet, where folks would have link pages that were just other cool sites Sure, discovery was harder, but it was harder to AstroTurf worth SEO too

javiramos 3y ago

With Perplexity [0] you can narrow you LLM interactions to only reference Academic articles or other high-quality sources. [0] https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/

Tomte 3y ago
Ignoring the question whether LLMs can produce the best, the idea wouldn‘t be to cite the best sources, but to train only on the best sources. A garbage hallucination with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy won‘t help anyone.
- throwanem 3y ago
  On the other hand, given the query "facial recognition in paper wasps", Perplexity just gave not only an answer in accord with my prior understanding derived from reading in the field, but also surfaced a paper [1] published two months ago that I hadn't yet seen. I expected less, and I suspect a researcher could easily find gaps. But from the perspective an amateur autodidact, that's still a fairly impressive result. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918592117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918592117
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

porphyra 3y ago

That makes sense but the principle of "more data = more better" suggests that maybe training an LLM on all the possible data and then fine tuning it to only spit out the best answers might be better than only training it on only the best data to begin with.

wolverine876 3y ago
How will training it on false data, for example, result in better output?

vecinu 3y ago

This might be a naive question but how does one determine what "best" is for multiple subjects? Even in your example, physics and mathematics could be curated for "best" when dealing with equations and foundational knowledge that has been hardened over decades. For history, climate change of invasion of Ukraine, isn't that sensitive to bias, manipulation and interpretation? These are not exact sciences.

wolverine876 3y ago
What do you think of how that was addressed in the GP?
colechristensen 3y ago
You have to spend quite a lot of time thinking about quality and values. It becomes impossible as the size of the “best slice” you’re seeking gets smaller (top half is much easier than top ten percent, etc) If your values are “everyone should agree with my opinions” you’ll have a garbage biased data set. There are other values though. Bias free is also impossible because having a definition of a perfectly neutral bias is itself a very strong bias.
animal_spirits 3y ago
"Best" will be chosen by the creators of software for specific application uses. Medical software will use the "best" medical LLM under the hood. Programming software (Copilot et. all) will use the "best" programming LLM. General purpose language models will probably still be used by the public when doing internet searches. Or, an idea that just popped into my head, use a classifier to determine which model can most accurately answer the user's query, and send the query off to that model for a response.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Reread the comment you responded to. We aren’t discussing the best LLM here but how to determine the best source.
bigger_cheese 3y ago

robrenaud 3y ago

Diversity and quantity are important for LLM training. A search engine can index more than just "the best sources", and show results from the tail when no relevant matches are in the best sources. I would agree that with a softer restatement of your thesis though, I am sure there is a lot of diminishing marginal utility in search indexing broadly, especially as the web keeps getting more and more full of spam and nonsense. For pre-training LLMs, the quality/quantity/diversity story is more nuanced. They do seem to benefit a lot from quantity. For a fixed LLM training budget, the choice to train on the same high quality documents for more epochs, or to train on lower quality but unseen data is an interesting area of research. Empirically, the research finds that additional epochs on the same data starts to diminish after the 4th iteration. All the research I've read tends to have an all or nothing flavor to data selection. Either it makes it in, and gets processed the same number of times, or it doesn't get in at all. There is probably some juice in the middle ground, where high quality data gets 4x'ed, bad data is still eliminated, but the lesser but not terrible data gets in once.

wolverine876 3y ago
Thanks for an informed response!

staplers 3y ago

a search engine that indexes only the highest quality Any for-profit search engine eventually loses quality as it succumbs to ad spend. It'd require subsidies to remain profit-neutral (skew towards quality). Think ycombinator and HN. Even a subscription model will eventually skew towards placating the masses with "dumbed down" content.

wolverine876 3y ago
> Even a subscription model will eventually skew towards placating the masses with "dumbed down" content. Accuracy and simplicity are not the same. I can see that most people won't want to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's take on Plato. But anyone can read the Associated Press rather than someone's misinfo on the topic. Cut out the latter.
thfuran 3y ago
Let's ban advertising and let the market sort out the price of search with that perverse incentive out of the way.

StableAlkyne 3y ago

> I've often thought that a search engine that indexes only the highest quality, probably hand-curated, sources would be highly desireable That's what I miss about the old internet, where folks would have link pages that were just other cool sites Sure, discovery was harder, but it was harder to AstroTurf worth SEO too