Even simpler: Can GPT-2 anticipate and build Gwen/Deepseek? I think the answer is almost trivially "no", so I wonder what changed?

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ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

Lots of things changed, GPT-2 is small (1.5e9) and is also a base model, so it is only doing next-token/autocomplete rather than prompt-response like even the first ChatGPT-3.5 was doing.

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jebarker an hour ago | parent [-]

Just for the sake of clarity: all LLMs up to today are still only doing next-token/autocomplete. The training process got additional stages to shape the model weights, but standalone LLMs are still deployed essentially identically.

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ben_w 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

If you gave GPT-2 a question and ended with a "?", it might answer, but also it might write several more questions in a similar category.

IMO, the mechanism isn't the important thing, the behaviour is. If you look at the step-by-step, we are also looking for the next word or motor action (and for whoever is about to suggest that we humans plan ahead, Transformer-based LLMs have been shown to also do this); as this is not a useful description of what it means to be a living brain, I'd say it's also not a useful description of what makes everything post-InstructGPT different from what came before.

	▲	jebarker 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I agree completely - behaviorally the models have changed drastically due to RLHF, RLVR and now maybe even more so due to agentic harnesses. But the mechanism of prediction hasn’t changed, that was all I was clarifying.