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hexaga 4 hours ago

You've confused yourself. Those problems are not fundamental to next token prediction, they are fundamental to reconstruction losses on large general text corpora.

That is to say, they are equally likely if you don't do next token prediction at all and instead do text diffusion or something. Architecture has nothing to do with it. They arise because they are early partial solutions to the reconstruction task on 'all the text ever made'. Reconstruction task doesn't care much about truthiness until way late in the loss curve (where we probably will never reach), so hallucinations are almost as good for a very long time.

RL as is typical in post-training _does not share those early solutions_, and so does not share the fundamental problems. RL (in this context) has its own share of problems which are different, such as reward hacks like: reliance on meta signaling (# Why X is the correct solution, the honest answer ...), lying (commenting out tests), manipulation (You're absolutely right!), etc. Anything to make the human press the upvote button or make the test suite pass at any cost or whatever.

With that said, RL post-trained models _inherit_ the problems of non-optimal large corpora reconstruction solutions, but they don't introduce more or make them worse in a directed manner or anything like that. There's no reason to think them inevitable, and in principle you can cut away the garbage with the right RL target.

Thinking about architecture at all (autoregressive CE, RL, transformers, etc) is the wrong level of abstraction for understanding model behavior: instead, think about loss surfaces (large corpora reconstruction, human agreement, test suites passing, etc) and what solutions exist early and late in training for them.