Yeah, I should have said RL, not RLVR. The point is RL interacts with external world, while autoregressive pretraining is limited to the passive ingestion, and RLHF relies on a model of human preferences that has no access to truth sources besides the limited training data it was built upon.

If you want a more concrete example, then LLMs are also trained on visual data these days, which means they do have access to the world in an important way. This directly contradicts the blogpost's claim that LLMs have

> no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.

Historically, that LLMs were text-only used to be a major argument for why they "lack access to meaning", see the Stochastic Parrot paper and the Octopus paper that it references. But even the authors of those papers have (grudgingly) conceded that the argument no longer holds due to multimodality.

No, I simply think the person is not familiar with these concepts, which is not a crime, it's okay to be wrong, I didn't want to banish that person from here, just corrected the statement. But might have been also a brain fart. Happens. Just wanted to correct it in the interest of beginner reading this.

Once Musk said he believes in Transformers instead of diffusion (or the other way around). When actually diffusion transformers are very popular and mainstream. What he meant was autoregressive inference vs diffusion. People like to use buzzwords while not knowing them. Old issue, it was the same decades ago.

To make it even more confusing, there are also diffusion LLMs, which typically but not necessary, use transformers also.

And independently of diffusion and transformer and llm or image generator, you can optionally put a GAN discriminator adversarial loss on any of them.

Analogy "it's not GAN, it's transformer!" - - "it's not a recursive implementation, it's object oriented!" if you are more familiar with CS.

Or "it's not 4-wheel-drive, it's diesel!", if familiar with cars.

Jiang et al. (2021) TransGAN: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3540261.3541391

In general probably not much of a stretch to get rid of convolutions or recurrence by replacing with attention and see if it works hence the title of the original transformers paper.

Someone says "cars are so comfortable now." Someone else responds "In my experience they are no better than in the 80s." Isn't it prudent to point that the second person drives Mirage or something like that?

The first sentence seems to imply the average state. No?

Of course, quality of the discussion above all else, including destroying the world and the fabric of society via a financial grifting scheme that is commoditizing free knowledge.