Comment by Planktonne
2 days ago
I'm not sure what you want me to do with that information; clearly I do think that my description is accurate.
The article is littered with both AI tells and admissions that 'next token prediction' is what is happening. Hence my description.
It was written by a human. There are AI edits but it’s very much a human composition. Perhaps a bit sloppy.
In my experience, people who do 'AI-assisted' writing tend to be very bad at noticing how much of their work AI has changed. I'm sure you put thought into it, but passing it through AI takes a lot of that out.
I think that’s fair, I didn’t actually run the whole thing through an AI. it was more targeted edits, but each time it does erode at my writing. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s a good reason to dismiss this. Because I did spend several hours writing it, and I did put a lot of thought into it, and it was not in any meaningful way generated by AI.
2 replies →
> I'm not sure what you want me to do with that information
For example, you could cite specific things that you believe to be "AI tells" or "admissions".
It's a short article; you could read it. One example to get you started is the very first sentence:
> Strictly speaking, the statement “LLMs are next-token predictors” isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.
The article is about how 'next-token predictor' is the wrong mental model; it opens with the admission that it is not the wrong mental model.
I did read it. People are allowed to disagree with your conclusions. Comment guidelines ask us all not to make such accusations.
To say that a statement is incomplete, but not strictly speaking wrong, is perfectly compatible with describing it informally as "wrong" in the sense used in the title (i.e.: "not the most appropriate possibility").
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Not the person you’re replying to, but I read the whole article as an admission that it’s still a next-token predictor. More specifically: what does RLVR fundamentally change that somehow makes the whole process no longer a next-token predictor? The article makes no attempt to explain this. Additionally, I find its framing of the term “next-token predictor” as meaning “predicting the next token only based on raw training data” in common usage to be a bit dishonest.
To summarize: yes, RLVR and other synthetic training methods exist! It’s still a next-token predictor, and it does not “learn” or “think” or “reason” in the human sense, like so many people seem to believe.