4 ms·

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

6510 2y ago
Make new q&a websites.
layer8 2y ago
While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
  - pipes 2y ago
    In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty
      - brookst 2y ago
        Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it wishful thinking, or a genuine technical misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation? LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.
        card_zero 2y ago
        I think it's a matter of perception. There's regurgitation. There's recombination. There's advanced recombination through layers of prestidigitation. And then there's actual human creativity, which you might deny is special, leaving us at an impasse because we can't provide you with a tool to measure it with. It just comes down to a philosophical face off, high noon with hand-waving instead of six-guns. But anyway the point is that LLMs produce a lot of novel stuff that we feel already tired of because it seems like we've seen it before.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data. Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new information, which I don't agree with. Quora does not care about the user experience. Their obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!). My soul really remembers hostile sites.
  - chii 2y ago
    > It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to > These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? Yea, those damn tractor makers - they ate the food that the hand farmers used to make! How are hand farmers expected to compete with tractors now, when it's so much more efficient and can do 100x the work!?
    - brookst 2y ago
      Not to mention the CS teachers who have to compete with the students they taught!
Legend2440 2y ago
Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere. But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.
- diamond559 2y ago
  That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".
  - gradus_ad 2y ago
    How about "more capable"?
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      I've had sufficiently similar experiences. Usually an LLM chatbot going off half-cocked before I'd fully specified my question, and taking offence to my "please shut the fuck up" (usually after a series of requests to stop). I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have closed.
      - literalAardvark 2y ago
        Sounds like you might have absolutely no idea how to create a prompt for an LLM. Telling it to stop is just creating a spurious prompt, lowering the quality of your interaction for no gain.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        So, <https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/ https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/>? Care to enlighten us heathens?
shagie 2y ago
Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its communication model. This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real. Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information". That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format. And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site. ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem. Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A. --- The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem. I am reminded of Accelerando ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations being various forms of scams and the currency is things that can think new ideas. The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. This sounds like the seed for a business model to pitch in the next upcoming hype cycle: "short-term hiring of experts with quarter-hourly billing increments enabled by our web- or app-based user interface". :-)

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

6510 2y ago

Make new q&a websites.

layer8 2y ago

While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
- pipes 2y ago
  In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty
    - brookst 2y ago
      Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it wishful thinking, or a genuine technical misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation? LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.
      - card_zero 2y ago
        I think it's a matter of perception. There's regurgitation. There's recombination. There's advanced recombination through layers of prestidigitation. And then there's actual human creativity, which you might deny is special, leaving us at an impasse because we can't provide you with a tool to measure it with. It just comes down to a philosophical face off, high noon with hand-waving instead of six-guns. But anyway the point is that LLMs produce a lot of novel stuff that we feel already tired of because it seems like we've seen it before.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data. Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new information, which I don't agree with. Quora does not care about the user experience. Their obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!). My soul really remembers hostile sites.
- chii 2y ago
  > It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to > These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? Yea, those damn tractor makers - they ate the food that the hand farmers used to make! How are hand farmers expected to compete with tractors now, when it's so much more efficient and can do 100x the work!?
  - brookst 2y ago
    Not to mention the CS teachers who have to compete with the students they taught!

Legend2440 2y ago

Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere. But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.

diamond559 2y ago
That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".
- gradus_ad 2y ago
  How about "more capable"?
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    I've had sufficiently similar experiences. Usually an LLM chatbot going off half-cocked before I'd fully specified my question, and taking offence to my "please shut the fuck up" (usually after a series of requests to stop). I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have closed.
    - literalAardvark 2y ago
      Sounds like you might have absolutely no idea how to create a prompt for an LLM. Telling it to stop is just creating a spurious prompt, lowering the quality of your interaction for no gain.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        So, <https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/ https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/>? Care to enlighten us heathens?

shagie 2y ago

Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its communication model. This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real. Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information". That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format. And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site. ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem. Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A. --- The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem. I am reminded of Accelerando ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations being various forms of scams and the currency is things that can think new ideas. The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. This sounds like the seed for a business model to pitch in the next upcoming hype cycle: "short-term hiring of experts with quarter-hourly billing increments enabled by our web- or app-based user interface". :-)