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Comment by thesz

21 days ago 

  > the huge gains in coding performance in the past year have come from RL, not from new sources of training data.

This one was on HN recently: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades

Author attributes past year's degradation of code generation by LLMs to excessive use of new source of training data, namely, users' code generation conversations.

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thesz

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dcre  20 days ago

Yeah, this is a bullshit article. There is no such degradation, and it’s absurd to say so on the basis of a single problem which the author describes as technically impossible. It is a very contrived under-specified prompt.

And their “explanation” blaming the training data is just a guess on their part, one that I suspect is wrong. There is no argument given that that’s the actual cause of the observed phenomenon. It’s a just-so story: something that sounds like it could explain it but there’s no evidence it actually does.

My evidence is that RL is more relevant is that that’s what every single researcher and frontier lab employee I’ve heard speak about LLMs in the past year has said. I have never once heard any of them mention new sources of pretraining data, except maybe synthetic data they generate and verify themselves, which contradicts the author’s story because it’s not shitty code grabbed off the internet.

  • thesz  20 days ago 

      > Yeah, this is a bullshit article. There is no such degradation, and it’s absurd to say so on the basis of a single problem which the author describes as technically impossible. It is a very contrived under-specified prompt.

    I see "No True Scotsman" argument above.

      > My evidence is that RL is more relevant is that that’s what every single researcher and frontier lab employee I’ve heard speak about LLMs in the past year has said.

    Reinforcement learning reinforces what is already in the LM, makes width of search path of possible correct answer narrower and wider search path in not-RL-tuned base models results in more correct answers [1].

    [1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=4OsgYD7em5

      > I have never once heard any of them mention new sources of pretraining data, except maybe synthetic data they generate and verify themselves, which contradicts the author’s story because it’s not shitty code grabbed off the internet.

    The sources of training data already were the reasons for allegations, even leading to lawsuits. So I would suspect that no engineer from any LLM company would disclose anything on their sources of training data besides innocently sounding "synthetic data verified by ourselves."

    From the days I have worked on blockchains, I am very skeptical about any company riding any hype. They face enormous competition and they will buy, borrow or steal their way to try to not go down even a little. So, until Anthropic opens the way they train their model so that we can reproduce their results, I will suspect they leaked test set into it and used users code generation conversation as new source of training data.