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Comment by abroszka33

4 days ago

What's the point of 150 pages description of a model that's going to be replaced in a couple months? Who even reads this? I know it's cheap to generate text with LLMs, but this is just noise at this point.

I actually do read them. Not in severe detail, but not casually either. 150 pages is really not very long and there doesn't seem to be too much bloat. (I would cut out the moral personhood stuff but that's a political/ideological thing).

This is snarky but I am grumpy: I wonder if there's a correlation between me refusing to use LLMs and me being happy to read a novella-sized PDF about them.

  • > I wonder if there's a correlation between me refusing to use LLMs and me being happy to read a novella-sized PDF about them.

    Semi related, but i would hate to read that PDF but i also hate reading what LLMs write lol.

    LLMs are pretty terrible at being concise. Using an LLM these days means putting up with bizarre and often confusing phrasing, wordy explanations, etc. It's kinda crazy to me how good they are but how bad their writing style is for me personally. Even though i use an LLM constantly i can't stand reading its responses.

  • > 150 pages is really not very long and there doesn't seem to be too much bloat.

    Maybe it's just me, but 150 pages is like third of a good book. Quite long. And it's full of LLM slop, they did not even bother to remove the em dashes.

    • Do you have specific examples you think are LLM-generated? I have only read a few parts, but they did not seem primarily LLM-generated to me. Using em-dashes is really not a good signal for this IMO.

      I'm not saying you're wrong btw; I'm sure this has many authors and some of them probably used LLMs significantly in the writing process.

      3 replies →

    • Sure, but don’t read it like a book, it’s more of a document to skim through

  • "I wonder if there's a correlation between me refusing to use LLMs and me being happy to read a novella-sized PDF about them."

    Well, one possible explanation is that you have time on your hands.

    Lots of people using LLMs do so because they are in a hurry to do or ship something. In your case it would appear you have time budget for reading.

  • You mean moral patienthood?

    There are many ways to read something, model cards are usually skimmed.

The system cards are effectively a data dump for researchers to sift through.

They're not meant for normal consumers who just want to use the model for work.

These cards are very important to knowing what the companies are tracking regarding safety.

Not just in what the models can or might want to do, but how they treat the operators they interact with.

If you look carefully, this card shows the addition of a new benchmark for "condescension" as a character trait.

I think a lot of people would like to see a comparable system card for the unannounced model that escaped openai last week.

literally nobody. i think most sane people would just run that through an LLM and get some high level takeaways or ask some specific questions they might be curious about.