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Comment by soneca

2 years ago

> ” One must imagine the conversation like a forum thread, since that’s the type of internet content GPT has been trained on”

Is it? Any source for that claim?

I would guess that books, fiction and nonfiction, papers, journalistic articles, lectures, speeches, all of it have equal or more weight than forum conversations

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soneca

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padolsey  2 years ago

Hmm well I believe reddit made up a huge portion of the training data for GPT2 but yes, tbh I have no support for the claim that that's the case with current versions. Anyway, I guess if we consider a forum as following the general scaffold of human conversation, it's a good analogy. But yes there's a tonne of other content at play. If we consider, "where does chatgpt inherit its conversational approach from?" .. that may be a good approach. Almost nowhere in human prose, from either journals or novels, is there an exchange where a tip is seen as inviting a more verbose or detailed conversational response. It's kinda nonsensical to assume it would work.

leobg  2 years ago

What the parent is suggesting is that content from forums is the only place where the model would have encountered the concept of getting a tip for a good answer. For all the other content in the training set like websites, books, articles and so on, that concept is completely foreign.

This is a first principles sanity check - very good to have against much of the snake oil in prompt engineering.

The one thing that is conceivable to me is that the model might have picked up on the more general concept, but if there has been a clear incentive then the effort to find a good answer is usually higher. This abstract form, I imagine, the model may have encountered not only in internet forums, but also in articles, books, and so on.