Comment by astrange
5 months ago
> When they release a true next-gen successor to GPT-4 (Orion, or whatever), we may see improvements. Everyone complains about the "ChatGPTese" writing style, and surely they'll fix that eventually.
IMO that has already peaked. GPT4 original certainly was terminally corny, but competitors like Claude/Llama aren't as bad, and neither is 4o. Some of the bad writing does from things they can't/don't want to solve - "harmlessness" RLHF especially makes them all cornier.
Then again, a lot of it is just that GPT4 speaks African English because it was trained by Kenyans and Nigerians. That's actually how they talk!
https://medium.com/@moyosoreale/the-paul-graham-vs-nigerian-...
I just wanted to thank you for the medium article you posted. I was online when Paul made that bizarre “delve” tweet but never knew so much about Nigeria and its English. As someone from a former British colony too I understood why using such a word was perfectly normal but wasn’t aware Kenyans and Nigerians trained ChatGPT.
It wasn't bizarre, it was ignorant if not borderline racist. He is telling native English speakers from non-anglosaxon countries that their English isn't normal
It's not normal, that's why its interesting.
A few things on that article, though:
1: If non-native english speakers were training ChatGPT, then of course non-native English essays would be flagged as AI generated! It's not their fault, its ours for thinking that exploited labor with a slick facade was magical machine intelligence.
2: These tools are widely used in the developing world since fluent english is a sign of education and class and opens doors for you socially and economically; why would Nigerians use such ornate english if it didn't come from a competition to show who can speak the language of the colonizer best?
3: It's undeniable that the ones responding to Paul Graham completely missed the point. Regardless of who uses what words when, the vast majority of papers, until ChatGPT was released, did not use the word "delve," and the incidence of that word in papers increased 10-fold after. Yes, its possible that the author used "delve" intentionally, but its statistically unlikely (especially since ChatGPT used "delve" in most of its responses). A small group of English speakers, who don't predominantly interact with VCs in Silicon Valley, do not make a difference in this judgement--even if there are a lot of Englishes, the only English that most people in the business world deal with is American, European, and South Asian. Compared to the English speakers of those regions, Nigeria is a small fraction.
If Paul Graham was dealing predominantly with Nigerians in his work, he probably would not have made that tweet in the first place.
3 replies →
Italians would say enormous since it's directly coming from latin.
In general all the people whose main language is a latin language are very likely to use those "difficult" words, because to them they are "completely normal" words.
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