Comment by virgildotcodes
1 hour ago
You're not quite addressing the question. More and more of the training data is now synthetic.
To be very specific - what novel things did the majority of the ~8 bil humans on Earth do say, yesterday, that you wouldn't otherwise dismiss as non-intelligent rehashing of the same tired patterns they always inhabit were those same actions attributed to LLMs?
What I'm getting at is that I think you're falling into the trap of thinking of the rare geniuses of human history, and furthermore their rare moments of accomplishment (relative to the long span of their lifetimes filled mostly without these accomplishments) when you think of "human intelligence", which is of course far overstating what actual human intelligence is.
Synthetic training data is carefully crafted by humans. The rare geniuses of human history use a different magnitude and configuration of the same kind of human intelligence that posted a dad joke on a site that got scraped into the training set and repeated, convincing people that it is intelligent like humans.
> that you wouldn't otherwise dismiss as non-intelligent rehashing of the same tired patterns they always inhabit were those same actions attributed to LLMs?
Regardless of whether something's been done before people still come up with them on their own without directly copying or amalgamating several copies. Pretty much every skilled profession includes figuring things out on the fly through the use of general reasoning that doesn't involve pattern matching against millions of examples.