4 ms·
I don’t think people fully appreciate yet how much of LLMs’ value comes from their underlying dataset (I.e. the entire internet - probably .. quadrillions..? of
by plaidfuji 2y ago
I don’t think people fully appreciate yet how much of LLMs’ value comes from their underlying dataset (I.e. the entire internet - probably .. quadrillions..? of tokens of text) rather than the model + compute itself.
If you’re trying to predict something within the manifold of data on the internet (which is incredibly vast, but not infinite), you will do very well with today’s LLMs. Building an internet-scale dataset for another problem domain is a monumental task, still with significant uncertainty about “how much is enough”.
People have been searching for the right analogy for “what type of company is Open AI most like?” I’ll suggest they’re like an oil company, but without the right to own oil fields. The internet is the field, the model is the refining process (which mostly yield the same output but with some variations - not dissimilar from petroleum products).. and the process / model is a significant asset. And today, Nvidia is the only manufacturer of refining equipment.
- ramblenode 2y agoThis is an interesting analogy. Of course oil extraction and refining are very complex, but most of the value in that industry is simply the oil. If you take the analogy further, while oil was necessary to jumpstart the petrochemical industry, biofuels and synthetic oil could potentially replace the natural stuff while keeping the rest of the value chain in tact (maybe not economical, but you get the idea). Is there a post-web source of data for LLMs once the well has been poisoned by bots? Maybe interactive chats?