Comment by mejutoco
1 year ago
> Where is the data that costs a billion dollars to train on going to come from? These companies are already training on most of the available valuable information that exists.
This is a lack of imagination.
All books written; all movies that exist on dvd; all music released in cd; all tv programs; all radio programs; all whatsapp messages; all of youtube; blueprints from architecture and mechanical engineering.
The copyright and logistics are definitely an issue, but there is more data.
I actually did imagine many of these data sources (and some of your ideas are new to me :), but question the level of additional useful capability they would provide for an LLM in the context of responding to user queries. Is more data always better? Or what level of curation results in the most useful model?
At some point I expect putting in too much data from semi-random or very old sources will have a detrimental effect on output quality.
In the extreme case, you could feed /dev/urandom. Haha, only kidding, but I'm sure you get my idea.
Now I'm wondering what a model trained in the past 45 years of Usenet would be like. Or all of the history of public messages on IRC servers like EFNet or Freenode (afaik they are not fully logged). It is an interesting topic, but I'm still curious and uncertain what the effect adding some multiples of data in the form of often lower fidelity sources (e.g. WhatsApp messages) will have on the capability of the final model. It's hard to understand how such sources would be helpful or useful.