This is an oversimplification: more data makes models smarter ceteris paribus, but mostly only because auto-regressive training (where most of the general knowledge comes from) is essentially compressing information that can be recalled later if it’s useful (or not recalled). Obviously there are differences in kind within “more data” too, you would much rather have all the books and blog posts in the world than all the fanfiction.

Yes, all three together would be even better. But it wouldn’t be if you had 100x more fanfiction, mostly synthetic, generated during RL to teach a model to be better at writing fan fiction. There are real limits to the amount of knowledge you can cram into fixed-size (downstream of hardware availability) weights. For a period scaling with data was basically “free” because we had the Internet and all the books/media that humans had already created; the data was accessible and limited (at least, the parts we think models should know about) enough and top-hardware big enough that we could basically compress the whole thing.

Post-training/RL are making this obsolete because they’re more about skill/capability acquisition rather than knowledge. They can generate much more data (most of it quotidian/useless, ie an agent made a typo in batch 382829) and clearly seem to cause a kind of mode collapse even in the most advanced frontier models.

We don’t need to make LLMs forget about SpongeBob SquarePants so they learn more about bash. But if I have a question about SpongeBob SquarePants, I don’t need to hear about load bearing seams prefaced with honest caveats after a model writes 400 lines of bash to look up SpongeBob’s family.

And there is probably a lot more SpongeBob knowledge we could put into models if we wanted to: interviews with the creative staff, a SpongeEnv/SpongeHarness modeling how the art/story team work together to create entertaining kids tv, a SpongeBench measuring entertainment value, etc. If a SpongeAgent spends 2000 years in Agent University learning how to Spongemaxx we probably don’t need or want to have it spend another 2000 years writing smoke tests

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