Have you looked at the what data companies (e.g. Scale, Mercor) hire for? Why do you think Meta records their employees every keystroke/mousestroke/eye-movement?

EDIT: just re-read your comment. I don't think you have a good understanding here, no offence.

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NitpickLawyer 9 hours ago | parent [-]

None taken, but it would be odd, since I've been training GOFAI models since 2010s and have had LMs in production since before chatgpt came out (before RLHF), so I think I have a pretty good understanding :) But I'm always open to learning.

I think the misunderstanding comes from "individually". You are thinking about diverse datasets, but that's not what individually means in this context. In ML individually trained means that for each task you prepare an architecture, dataset and eval and train that model on that data. And each model has its own objective that you train for. In LMs the objective is singular, for every data point - next token prediction. And, importantly, you train on every datapoint, the more diverse the better, but not independently. The cool thing is that training on diverse datasets improves scores on other downstream tasks, while the training objective is the same.

So you can have a training run on common crawl + programming that improves scores on logic puzzles, or common crawl + novels that improves scores on planning tasks. But the important thing is that it's all trained together, not independently.

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am17an 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I think we're saying the same thing? I said they are explicitly trained on these tasks, not that they are some separate models during programming RL, or business tasks RL.

> The cool thing is that training on diverse datasets improves scores on other downstream tasks, while the training objective is the same.

Maybe for some language modelling tasks, i.e. it learns some internal representation that is transferable. However I would find it quite odd if a model becomes good at Bio while not explicitly going through Bio training.

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NitpickLawyer 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> I said they are explicitly trained on these tasks, not that they are some separate models during programming RL, or business tasks RL.

You said:

> > nor are they trained for each task individually.

> They are explicitly trained for each task individually.

And that's the main misunderstanding.

Collins says:

individually in American English (ˌɪndəˈvɪdʒuəli, ˌɪndəˈvɪdʒəli) adverb 1. as an individual or individuals rather than as a group; one at a time; separately; singly

Which is precisely what LMs don't do (in contrast to previous "AI" models, which did do that). They are trained on every datapoint at the same time. So long as we agree on that, I think we are saying the same thing :)

	▲	am17an 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Your username indeed checks out