5 ms·

>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 Engl

>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...
idunnoman1222 2y ago
I’m not sure I see the value in conflating input, tokens, and output. Tokens. Hamilton certainly read and experienced more tokens than he wrote on a pieces of paper.
astrange 2y ago
> 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. IMO that has already peaked. GPT4 original certainly was terminally corny, but competitors like Claude/Llama aren't as bad, and neither is 4o. Some of the bad writing does from things they can't/don't want to solve - "harmlessness" RLHF especially makes them all cornier. Then again, a lot of it is just that GPT4 speaks African English because it was trained by Kenyans and Nigerians. That's actually how they talk! https://medium.com/@moyosoreale/the-paul-graham-vs-nigerian-twitter-saga-lexical-racism-and-language-bias-masked-as-chatgpt-53ee9f6459aa https://medium.com/@moyosoreale/the-paul-graham-vs-nigerian-...
- onetokeoverthe 2y ago
  [dead]
- user_7832 2y ago
  I just wanted to thank you for the medium article you posted. I was online when Paul made that bizarre “delve” tweet but never knew so much about Nigeria and its English. As someone from a former British colony too I understood why using such a word was perfectly normal but wasn’t aware Kenyans and Nigerians trained ChatGPT.
  - bossyTeacher 2y ago
    It wasn't bizarre, it was ignorant if not borderline racist. He is telling native English speakers from non-anglosaxon countries that their English isn't normal
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      It's not normal, that's why its interesting. A few things on that article, though: 1: If non-native english speakers were training ChatGPT, then of course non-native English essays would be flagged as AI generated! It's not their fault, its ours for thinking that exploited labor with a slick facade was magical machine intelligence. 2: These tools are widely used in the developing world since fluent english is a sign of education and class and opens doors for you socially and economically; why would Nigerians use such ornate english if it didn't come from a competition to show who can speak the language of the colonizer best? 3: It's undeniable that the ones responding to Paul Graham completely missed the point. Regardless of who uses what words when, the vast majority of papers, until ChatGPT was released, did not use the word "delve," and the incidence of that word in papers increased 10-fold after. Yes, its possible that the author used "delve" intentionally, but its statistically unlikely (especially since ChatGPT used "delve" in most of its responses). A small group of English speakers, who don't predominantly interact with VCs in Silicon Valley, do not make a difference in this judgement--even if there are a lot of Englishes, the only English that most people in the business world deal with is American, European, and South Asian. Compared to the English speakers of those regions, Nigeria is a small fraction. If Paul Graham was dealing predominantly with Nigerians in his work, he probably would not have made that tweet in the first place.
trilbyglens 2y ago
What could go wrong!

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...

idunnoman1222 2y ago

I’m not sure I see the value in conflating input, tokens, and output. Tokens. Hamilton certainly read and experienced more tokens than he wrote on a pieces of paper.

astrange 2y ago

> 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. IMO that has already peaked. GPT4 original certainly was terminally corny, but competitors like Claude/Llama aren't as bad, and neither is 4o. Some of the bad writing does from things they can't/don't want to solve - "harmlessness" RLHF especially makes them all cornier. Then again, a lot of it is just that GPT4 speaks African English because it was trained by Kenyans and Nigerians. That's actually how they talk! https://medium.com/@moyosoreale/the-paul-graham-vs-nigerian-twitter-saga-lexical-racism-and-language-bias-masked-as-chatgpt-53ee9f6459aa https://medium.com/@moyosoreale/the-paul-graham-vs-nigerian-...

onetokeoverthe 2y ago
[dead]
user_7832 2y ago
I just wanted to thank you for the medium article you posted. I was online when Paul made that bizarre “delve” tweet but never knew so much about Nigeria and its English. As someone from a former British colony too I understood why using such a word was perfectly normal but wasn’t aware Kenyans and Nigerians trained ChatGPT.
- bossyTeacher 2y ago
  It wasn't bizarre, it was ignorant if not borderline racist. He is telling native English speakers from non-anglosaxon countries that their English isn't normal
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    It's not normal, that's why its interesting. A few things on that article, though: 1: If non-native english speakers were training ChatGPT, then of course non-native English essays would be flagged as AI generated! It's not their fault, its ours for thinking that exploited labor with a slick facade was magical machine intelligence. 2: These tools are widely used in the developing world since fluent english is a sign of education and class and opens doors for you socially and economically; why would Nigerians use such ornate english if it didn't come from a competition to show who can speak the language of the colonizer best? 3: It's undeniable that the ones responding to Paul Graham completely missed the point. Regardless of who uses what words when, the vast majority of papers, until ChatGPT was released, did not use the word "delve," and the incidence of that word in papers increased 10-fold after. Yes, its possible that the author used "delve" intentionally, but its statistically unlikely (especially since ChatGPT used "delve" in most of its responses). A small group of English speakers, who don't predominantly interact with VCs in Silicon Valley, do not make a difference in this judgement--even if there are a lot of Englishes, the only English that most people in the business world deal with is American, European, and South Asian. Compared to the English speakers of those regions, Nigeria is a small fraction. If Paul Graham was dealing predominantly with Nigerians in his work, he probably would not have made that tweet in the first place.

trilbyglens 2y ago

What could go wrong!