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The whole robotic, monotone, helpful assistant thing was something these companies had to actively hammer in during the post-training stage. It's not really how

The whole robotic, monotone, helpful assistant thing was something these companies had to actively hammer in during the post-training stage. It's not really how LLMs will sound by default after pre-training. I guess they're caring less and less about that effort especially since it hurts the model in some ways like creative writing.

sebastiennight 2y ago
If it's just a different choice during RLHF, I'll be curious to see what are the trade-offs in performance. The "buddy in a chat group" style answers do not make me feel like asking it for a story will make the story long/detailed/poignant enough to warrant the difference. I'll give it a try and compare on creative tasks.
turnsout 2y ago
Or maybe they're just getting better at it, or developing better taste. After switching to Claude, I can't go back to ChatGPT's overly verbose bullet-point laden book reports every time I ask a question. I don't think that's pretraining—it's in the way OpenAI approaches tuning and prompting vs Anthropic.
capnrefsmmat 2y ago
Maybe, but I'm not sure how much the style is deliberate vs. a consequence of the post-training tasks like summarization and problem solving. Without seeing the post-training tasks and rating systems it's hard to judge if it's a deliberate style or an emergent consequence of other things. But it's definitely the case that base models sound more human than instruction-tuned variants. And the shift isn't just vocabulary, it's also in grammar and rhetorical style. There's a shift toward longer words, but also participial phrases, phrasal coordination (with "and" and "or"), and nominalizations (turning adjectives/adverbs into nouns, like "development" or "naturalness"). https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  How is "development" an adverb or adjective turned into a noun?? It comes from a French word (développement) and that in turns was just a natural derivation of the verb "développer"... no adverbs or adjectives (English or otherwise) seem to come into play here
  - capnrefsmmat 2y ago
    Sorry, I should have said adjectives or verbs, as it's "develop" turned into a noun. Just like "discernment" or "punishment". The etymology isn't relevant for classifying it as a nominalization, only the grammatical function.

sebastiennight 2y ago

If it's just a different choice during RLHF, I'll be curious to see what are the trade-offs in performance. The "buddy in a chat group" style answers do not make me feel like asking it for a story will make the story long/detailed/poignant enough to warrant the difference. I'll give it a try and compare on creative tasks.

turnsout 2y ago

Or maybe they're just getting better at it, or developing better taste. After switching to Claude, I can't go back to ChatGPT's overly verbose bullet-point laden book reports every time I ask a question. I don't think that's pretraining—it's in the way OpenAI approaches tuning and prompting vs Anthropic.

capnrefsmmat 2y ago

Maybe, but I'm not sure how much the style is deliberate vs. a consequence of the post-training tasks like summarization and problem solving. Without seeing the post-training tasks and rating systems it's hard to judge if it's a deliberate style or an emergent consequence of other things. But it's definitely the case that base models sound more human than instruction-tuned variants. And the shift isn't just vocabulary, it's also in grammar and rhetorical style. There's a shift toward longer words, but also participial phrases, phrasal coordination (with "and" and "or"), and nominalizations (turning adjectives/adverbs into nouns, like "development" or "naturalness"). https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107

sebastiennight 2y ago
How is "development" an adverb or adjective turned into a noun?? It comes from a French word (développement) and that in turns was just a natural derivation of the verb "développer"... no adverbs or adjectives (English or otherwise) seem to come into play here
- capnrefsmmat 2y ago
  Sorry, I should have said adjectives or verbs, as it's "develop" turned into a noun. Just like "discernment" or "punishment". The etymology isn't relevant for classifying it as a nominalization, only the grammatical function.