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Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades
by jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?
So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.
- spiderfarmer 9mo ago> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.
- okaleniuk 9mo agoWalking doesn't change as often as C++ standard.
- jakeydus 9mo agoThe issue here is borrowing from the future to pay for the present. The bicycle analogy (unless I'm missing something huge here) does not seem relevant at all.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoWhy do you think source code and documentation are not enough for an LLM to train on?
- xeromal 9mo agoI think they are positing that LLMs do not produce new thought. If a new framework (super magic new framework) is released, current LLMs will not be able to help.
- ndriscoll 9mo agoWhy wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of libraries. I expect it to be able to use a language server to find the right definitions and load them into context as needed. I expect it to have very deep inbuilt knowledge of computer science and architecture to make sense of everything it sees.
- miningape 9mo agoBecause LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise"). Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings us full circle, what will companies use as training data without answers in places like SO?
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoYou’re talking about ChatGPT 2.0 and severely underestimate the capabilities of today’s models.
- miningape 9mo agoIt's well known that even current LLMs do not perform well on logic games when you change the names / language used. i.e. try asking it to swap the meanings of the words red and green and ask it to describe the colors in a painting and analyse it with color theory - notice how quickly the results degrade, often attributing "green" qualities to "red" since it's now calling it "green". What this shows us is that training data (where the associations are made) plays a significant role in the level of answer an LLM can give, no matter how good your context is (at overriding the associations / training data). This demonstrates that training data is more important (for "novel" work) than context is.
- alistairSH 9mo agoNot sure I understand... How will CharGPT/CoPilot/whatever learn about the next great front-end framework? The LLMs know about existing frameworks by learning on existing content (from StackOverflow and elsewhere). If StackOverflow (and elsewhere) go away, there's nothing to provide a training material.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- lanyard-textile 9mo agoWhy, us of course. The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?
- Eisenstein 9mo ago> The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Does Claude code copy your repository onto its server?
- NiloCK 9mo agoI do not know whether I'm misinterpreting this comment but: Yes, the context from working sessions moves over the wire - claude "the model" doesn't work inside the CLI on your machine - it's an API service that the cli wraps.
- lanyard-textile 9mo agoNo -- but your follow-up interactions would, and that's something that could be cleaned and filtered upon. Edit: I also mean to imply that maybe this could be more observable in the future. Opt-in, of course.
- FuckButtons 9mo agoIf you truly believe that the ai companies, who have used essentially all of the worlds ip without asking for permission won’t use yours because you gave them $20 a month, I have some magic beans to sell you.
- jrjeksjd8d 9mo agoIs anyone actually doing that level of fine-tuning? My understanding of LLMs is that they shovel in all the code they can find regardless of quality and let the Lord sort it out.
- oceanplexian 9mo agoI think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.
- cogman10 9mo agoIn fact, I think this is part of what lead to the downfall of SO. The moderation could be very aggressive with "duplicate" posts getting closed fast. The problem is sometimes the "solution" in the duplicate was either irrelevant or dated. Things like telling someone to us jQuery in 2020.
- zahlman 9mo agoPeople keep saying this specifically about jQuery, but without any object examples.
- rurp 9mo agoIf you lookup how to do any sort of standard front end operation there's a good chance the top SO answer will reference jQuery or some other outdated approach. I don't typically save these cases for future reference but have seen them many times and expect most people who have spent much time searching these topics have as well.
- herbturbo 9mo agoYou must have been using SO different to me then. For me it was more like a Wikipedia for specific language errors, compiler/IDE issues etc. Never once saw anyone discussing how to implement CRUD or claiming one framework was better than another. That was the point - concrete answers not opinions.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago> The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude Are you saying that because you don't like web apps or the frameworks that people use to make them, there shouldn't be a way for people to publicly ask questions about programming?
- eunos 9mo ago> . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Hopefully Reasoning is much better that training on original code and API docs are sufficient
- beeboop0 9mo ago[dead]