| ▲ | teiferer 3 hours ago | |
I don't think that's a suitable mental model of how LLMs work. Their output is not just the statistical average of all the training data. If it was then the output would be quite useless. | ||
| ▲ | Loquebantur 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
An LLM trained on the entire internet incorporates essentially all (human-known) aspects of things. Like a superposition of all kinds of writing styles, all perspectives on every topic and all kinds of ways to do things right and wrong. In post-training (and of course already by sensibly curating the input data in the first place), people try to select useful submanifolds from that. Ideally, you get a combination of all the extant strengths of people combined into one model. Self-improvement then leaves the sphere of human capability for good. | ||