5 ms·

It seems like the best AI models are increasingly just combinations of writings of various people thrown together. Like they hired a few hundred professors, jou

It seems like the best AI models are increasingly just combinations of writings of various people thrown together. Like they hired a few hundred professors, journalists and writers to work with the model and create material for it, so you just get various combinations of their contributions. It's very telling that this model, for instance, is extraordinarily good at STEM related queries, but much worse (and worse even in comparison to GPT4) than English composition, probably because the former is where the money is to be made, in automating away essentially almost all engineering jobs.

GaggiX 2y ago
Do you have a source about OpenAI hiring a few hundred professors, journalists and writers? Because I honestly doubt.
- mattkrause 2y ago
  A few recruiters have contacted me (a scientist) about doing RLHF and annotation on biomedical tasks. I don’t know if the eventual client was OpenAI or some other LLM provider but they seemed to have money to burn.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    I fill in gaps in my contracting with one of these providers, and I know who the ultimate client is, and if you were to list 4-5 options they'd be in there. I've also done work for another company doing work in this space that had at least 4-5 different clients in that space that I can't be sure about. So, yes, while I can't confirm if OpenAI does this, I know one of the big players do, and it's likely most of the other clients are among the top ones...
- tough 2y ago
  Just all their chatgpt customers
- COAGULOPATH 2y ago
  I've heard rumors that GPT4's training data included "a custom dataset of college textbooks", curated by hand. Nothing beyond that. https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/14wcy7m/comment/jrir37r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/14wcy7m/comment/...
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  just look at what the major labelers are selling - it is exactly that. go to scale ai’s page
- wslh 2y ago
  In our company we received a linguistic that worked on OpenAI and he was not alone.
COAGULOPATH 2y ago
>but much worse (and worse even in comparison to GPT4) than English composition O1 is supposed to be a reasoning model, so I don't think judging it by its English composition abilities is quite fair. When they release a true next-gen successor to GPT-4 (Orion, or whatever), we may see improvements. Everyone complains about the "ChatGPTese" writing style, and surely they'll fix that eventually. >Like they hired a few hundred professors, journalists and writers to work with the model and create material for it, so you just get various combinations of their contributions. I'm doubtful. The most prolific (human) author is probably Charles Hamilton, who wrote 100 million words in his life. Put through the GPT tokenizer, that's 133m tokens. Compared to the text training data for a frontier LLM (trillions or tens of trillions of tokens), it's unrealistic that human experts are doing any substantial amount of bespoke writing. They're probably mainly relying on synthetic data at this point.
- vidarh 2y ago
  The bulk in terms of the number of tokens may well be synthetic data, but I personally know of at least 3 companies, 2 of whom I've done work for, that have people doing substantial amounts of bespoke writing under rather heavy NDAs. I've personally done a substantial amount of bespoke writing for training data for one provider, at good tech contractor fees (though I know I'm one of the highest-paid people for that company and the span of rates is a factor of multiple times even for a company with no exposure to third world contractors). That said, the speculation you just "get various combinations" of those contributions is nonsense, and it's also by no means only STEM data.
  - herval 2y ago
    how do those companies gauge that what those contractors are writing isnt AI-generated?
    - vidarh 2y ago
      It doesn't matter if it's AI-generated per se, so it's no crisis if some make it true. It matters if it is good. So multiple rounds of reviews to judge the output and pick up reviewers that keep producing poor results. But I also know they've fired people who were dumb enough to cut and paste a response that included UI elements from a given AI website...
echelon 2y ago
Wizard of Oz. There is no magic, it's all smoke and mirrors. The models and prompts are all monkey-patched and this isn't a step towards general superintelligence. Just hacks. And once you realize that, you realize that there is no moat for the existing product. Throw some researchers and GPUs together and you too can have the same system. It wouldn't be so bad for ClopenAI if every company under the sun wasn't also trying to build LLMs and agents and chains of thought. But as it stands, one key insight from one will spread through the entire ecosystem and everyone will have the same capability. This is all great from the perspective of the user. Unlimited competition and pricing pressure.
- colejohnson66 2y ago
  Quite a few times, the secret sauce for a company is just having enough capital to make it unviable for people to not use you. Then, by the time everyone catches up, you’ve outspent them on the next generation. OpenAI, for example, has spent untold millions on chips/cards from Nvidia. Open models keep catching up, but OpenAI keeps releasing newer stuff.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    "Nothing you can make that can't be made" -- The Beatles :)
  - neodymiumphish 2y ago
    Fortunately, Anthropic is doing an excellent job at matching or beating OpenAI in the user-facing models and pricing. I don’t know enough about the technical side to say anything definitive, but I’ve been choosing Claude over ChatGPT for most tasks lately; it always seems to do a better job at helping me work out quick solutions in Python and/or SQL.
    - bossyTeacher 2y ago
      My main issue with Anthropic is that Amazon is an investor in anthropic. I would rather have far more ethical companies onboard. I know Microsoft is no angel but Amazon seems like the worse one. In my ideal world, Microsoft backs Anthropic and Amazon OpenAi.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 2y ago
I haven't played with the latest or even most recent iterations, but last time I checked it was very easy to talk ChatGPT into setting up date structures like arrays and queues, populating them with axioms, and then doing inferential reasoning with them. Any time it balked you could reassure it by referencing specific statements that it had agreed to be true. Once you get the hang of this you could persuade it to chat about its internal buffers, formulate arguments for its own consciousness, interrupt you while you're typing, and more.
FuckButtons 2y ago
There’s hypothetically a lot of money to be made by automating away engineering jobs. Sticking on an autoregressive self prompting loop to gpt-4 isn’t going to get open-ai there. With their burn rate what it is, I’m not convinced they will be able to automate away anyone’s job, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

GaggiX 2y ago

Do you have a source about OpenAI hiring a few hundred professors, journalists and writers? Because I honestly doubt.

mattkrause 2y ago
A few recruiters have contacted me (a scientist) about doing RLHF and annotation on biomedical tasks. I don’t know if the eventual client was OpenAI or some other LLM provider but they seemed to have money to burn.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I fill in gaps in my contracting with one of these providers, and I know who the ultimate client is, and if you were to list 4-5 options they'd be in there. I've also done work for another company doing work in this space that had at least 4-5 different clients in that space that I can't be sure about. So, yes, while I can't confirm if OpenAI does this, I know one of the big players do, and it's likely most of the other clients are among the top ones...
tough 2y ago
Just all their chatgpt customers
COAGULOPATH 2y ago
I've heard rumors that GPT4's training data included "a custom dataset of college textbooks", curated by hand. Nothing beyond that. https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/14wcy7m/comment/jrir37r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/14wcy7m/comment/...
whimsicalism 2y ago
just look at what the major labelers are selling - it is exactly that. go to scale ai’s page
wslh 2y ago
In our company we received a linguistic that worked on OpenAI and he was not alone.

COAGULOPATH 2y ago

>but much worse (and worse even in comparison to GPT4) than English composition O1 is supposed to be a reasoning model, so I don't think judging it by its English composition abilities is quite fair. When they release a true next-gen successor to GPT-4 (Orion, or whatever), we may see improvements. Everyone complains about the "ChatGPTese" writing style, and surely they'll fix that eventually. >Like they hired a few hundred professors, journalists and writers to work with the model and create material for it, so you just get various combinations of their contributions. I'm doubtful. The most prolific (human) author is probably Charles Hamilton, who wrote 100 million words in his life. Put through the GPT tokenizer, that's 133m tokens. Compared to the text training data for a frontier LLM (trillions or tens of trillions of tokens), it's unrealistic that human experts are doing any substantial amount of bespoke writing. They're probably mainly relying on synthetic data at this point.

vidarh 2y ago
The bulk in terms of the number of tokens may well be synthetic data, but I personally know of at least 3 companies, 2 of whom I've done work for, that have people doing substantial amounts of bespoke writing under rather heavy NDAs. I've personally done a substantial amount of bespoke writing for training data for one provider, at good tech contractor fees (though I know I'm one of the highest-paid people for that company and the span of rates is a factor of multiple times even for a company with no exposure to third world contractors). That said, the speculation you just "get various combinations" of those contributions is nonsense, and it's also by no means only STEM data.
- herval 2y ago
  how do those companies gauge that what those contractors are writing isnt AI-generated?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    It doesn't matter if it's AI-generated per se, so it's no crisis if some make it true. It matters if it is good. So multiple rounds of reviews to judge the output and pick up reviewers that keep producing poor results. But I also know they've fired people who were dumb enough to cut and paste a response that included UI elements from a given AI website...

echelon 2y ago

Wizard of Oz. There is no magic, it's all smoke and mirrors. The models and prompts are all monkey-patched and this isn't a step towards general superintelligence. Just hacks. And once you realize that, you realize that there is no moat for the existing product. Throw some researchers and GPUs together and you too can have the same system. It wouldn't be so bad for ClopenAI if every company under the sun wasn't also trying to build LLMs and agents and chains of thought. But as it stands, one key insight from one will spread through the entire ecosystem and everyone will have the same capability. This is all great from the perspective of the user. Unlimited competition and pricing pressure.

colejohnson66 2y ago
Quite a few times, the secret sauce for a company is just having enough capital to make it unviable for people to not use you. Then, by the time everyone catches up, you’ve outspent them on the next generation. OpenAI, for example, has spent untold millions on chips/cards from Nvidia. Open models keep catching up, but OpenAI keeps releasing newer stuff.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  "Nothing you can make that can't be made" -- The Beatles :)
- neodymiumphish 2y ago
  Fortunately, Anthropic is doing an excellent job at matching or beating OpenAI in the user-facing models and pricing. I don’t know enough about the technical side to say anything definitive, but I’ve been choosing Claude over ChatGPT for most tasks lately; it always seems to do a better job at helping me work out quick solutions in Python and/or SQL.
  - bossyTeacher 2y ago
    My main issue with Anthropic is that Amazon is an investor in anthropic. I would rather have far more ethical companies onboard. I know Microsoft is no angel but Amazon seems like the worse one. In my ideal world, Microsoft backs Anthropic and Amazon OpenAi.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 2y ago

I haven't played with the latest or even most recent iterations, but last time I checked it was very easy to talk ChatGPT into setting up date structures like arrays and queues, populating them with axioms, and then doing inferential reasoning with them. Any time it balked you could reassure it by referencing specific statements that it had agreed to be true. Once you get the hang of this you could persuade it to chat about its internal buffers, formulate arguments for its own consciousness, interrupt you while you're typing, and more.

FuckButtons 2y ago

There’s hypothetically a lot of money to be made by automating away engineering jobs. Sticking on an autoregressive self prompting loop to gpt-4 isn’t going to get open-ai there. With their burn rate what it is, I’m not convinced they will be able to automate away anyone’s job, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.