Comment by cootsnuck
4 days ago
There's multiple papers on model collapse. Being able to avoid model collapse is different from it "being disproven".
If you just mean its risk has been over exaggerated and/or over simplified then yea, you'd have a point.
Fair point, I've updated the post to highlight that even the original paper specifics "indiscriminate" use of model outputs.
Having spent quite a bit of time diving into many questionable "research" papers (the original model collapse paper is not actually one of these, it's a solid paper), there's a very common pattern of showing that something does or does not work under special conditions but casually making generalized claims about those results. It's so easy with LLMs to find a way to get the result you want that there are far too many papers out there that people quickly take as fact when the claims are much, much weaker than the papers let on. So I tend to get a bit reactionary when addressing many of these "facts" about LLMs.
But you are correct that with the model collapse paper this is much more the public misunderstanding the claims of the original paper than any fault with that paper itself.