In large language model (LLM) pretraining, data quality is believed to determine model quality. In this paper, we re-examine the notion of “quality” from the perspective of pre- and post-training co-design. Specifically, we explore the possibility that pre-training on more toxic data can lead to better control in post-training, ultimately decreasing a model’s output toxicity. First, we use a toy experiment to study how data composition affects the geometry of features in the representation space. Next, through controlled experiments with Olmo-1B models trained on varying ratios of clean and toxic data, we find that the concept of toxicity enjoys a less entangled linear representation as the proportion of toxic data increases. Furthermore, we show that although toxic data increases the generational toxicity of the base model, it also makes the toxicity easier to remove. Evaluations on Toxigen and Real Toxicity Prompts demonstrate that models trained on toxic data achieve a better trade-off between reducing generational toxicity and preserving general capabilities when detoxifying techniques such as inference-time intervention (ITI) are applied. Our findings suggest that, with post-training taken into account, bad data may lead to good models.
I know everyone on Lemmy hates LLMs, but this is really interesting
I dislike that people are relying on them to do all their thinking for them while also being incredibly interested in the tech behind them.
I recently realized it’s a non-issue. The people doing this have already been looking for decades to find new ways to rot their minds. LLMs are just the latest in a long line of tools that help them tune out.
I’ve said this a few times in a different way and I always get downvoted. The fact is that the people who will use the LLMs to think for them, were not gonna think a lot in the first place.
This is true, but we don’t need people putting glue on their pizza. These people used to have a person to ask now they’ll be asking Sam Altman
Well I would make the argument that someone stupid enough to do such a thing kinda deserves whatever consequences their actions have. I find that people learn faster when actions have consequences instead of everything being babyproofed.
Sometimes things aren’t obvious unless you already have the knowledge. If an AI tool tells a young person cleaning their first apartment to combine household cleaners, are they stupid for doing so? Maybe. They may not have the experience to know. Stupid people deserve to live free from harm too, and we’re all a little stupid.
There’s a balance to be struck.
Strongly disagree. Survival of the fittest based eugenics is not acceptable. Stupid people don’t deserve to suffer.
No, we were juat eating tide pods. Dumb gonna do what dumb gonna do. The only real issue with llms is that their training data is stolen, and that theyre currently not that useful due to hallucinations and lacking logical reasoning.
Not when companies force them on you as well.
My current company forces me to use it and measures how many prompts I’m making as “productivity”.
That sounds like a terrible company, NGL. I’m sorry there aren’t other options for you.
I wish they would tone down the crusade. This is some of the most interesting technology to come out in decades.
It’s extremely useful for many things, if you know how to use it, and it’s annoying and useless for many others, which is what they fixate on and keep-jerk react to
My gf’s employer was going into administration last month. AI was surprisingly competent in determining where to seek advice and had a decent understanding of what to expect and how to approach things such as not getting paid on time (which happened last week).
Of course, we double and triple checked any information given to us with the relevant bodies, but it provided a little relief to go into something so chilling not being completely clueless.
AI has its use, but you have to know how to extract the information you need.
It’s stupid the way people are using it for therapy. Like, by all means ask it if it knows any organisations which can help you, then look those up, but don’t tell it a load of personal information about your relationship, because the reply will be something akin to the advice you see on r/relationships (which is probably where it scraped its data from) 😅
And I wish they would tone down the hype. Maybe we can meet in the middle?
Well, I do wish they would promote the actual use and limitations of AI and stop making up crap and overselling the use cases. I use ChatGPT at work all the time as a start for research, but if I took any of it as being reliable info to run with I would be in grave trouble. It is a great tool that has saved me much time because I know how far to trust it and how to use it. The progress is very impressive as I’ve been using AI art services for years, and the difference between the random blobs from back then and the great stuff it can generate now is pretty stark. Same thing with the LLMs. I’ve been using ChatGPT since it showed up and it has improved greatly since then. Before all this I talked to people who were using AI training on various picture recognition projects where getting data from other sensors was not practical. … Overall AI is pretty exciting, but the non-stop hype and hate headlines is doing nobody any favors.
I don’t dislike LLMs, I dislike people who treat them as anything more than an advanced search engine and stupidly give them all their confidential data. Seen it happen too much at work.
This is a “guns don’t kill people - people kill people” kind of scenario.
As a standalone thing, LLMs are awesome.
What sucks is greedy people using them for the wrong reasons.
It’s like robots. Playing with robots are awesome. Firing 1,000 people and replacing them with robots - and not sharing the benefits with the community sucks.
They really aren’t though and that is half the problem. Everyone pretends they are awesome when the results are unusable garbage 80% of the time which makes them unusable for 99% of practical applications.
Those numbers are baseless exaggerations. There are plenty of tasks which they solve perfectly, today. It’s just that a bunch of dicks operate them, and the cost of operating them are way too high.
Also:
It’s not that they’re not useful, that’s just nonsense.
Name a single task you would trust an LLM on solving for you that you feel confident would be correct without checking the output. Because that is my definition of perfectly and AI falls very, very far short of that.
“Hey AI, write me a random poem about taladar.”
i used it when i traveled to japan to ask it for english->japanese translations. it gave back results for multiple contexts, politeness levels, and broke down each sentence into its parts. my native speaker friends validated a few responses.
if youre going to be pedantic about “perfect” then nothing, not even a human, is going to live up.
willful ignorance about the things ai can be good at today is not going to do any favors for your fight against ai in the future. know your enemy and all that.
Who says you can’t check their outputs? It’s much faster to e. g. read a generated text than to write everything yourself. Same applies to translations, they’ve been excellent for quite a while now.
Business communication can be handled effortlessly by AI. Of course you read the result before you send it out, but that takes an order of a magnitude less time than formulating and typing all those meaningless sentences.
And honestly, that’s a perfect use case for AI. I wouldn’t compose a love letter to my family using AI, but a pamphlet, feature description, sales pitch, any bullshit presentation deck? You bet AI excels at those.
Same applies to content summaries that help augment search indices. Finding a large number of content candidates (e. g. videos) and have AI summarize the contents of said videos to narrow down the search is helpful and works today.
I’m not looking for AGI. I’m looking for tools to make my life easier, but in an ethical manner that doesn’t advance the destruction of the planet at an exponential rate, just for some tech bro to jerk it and buy another yacht.
You can make a generic fill in the blanks for all of those like I do and just change the key terminology for each scenario. LLMs are competing with search and replace?
That’s why I said “as standalone things.” As a computing curiosity, they’re amazing. No language processing application like this existed 30 years ago when I was a kid. You could also see “talking computers” speaking naturally, pretending or not, on movies and TV shows.
That’s a bit too dismissive. I’ve had a lot of interesting chats with LLMs that led me to find out what I didn’t understand about something. As an example I’m reading a book explaining some practices of Structured Concurrency in Swift and many times I asked ChatGPT is the author is correct about some phrasing that seemed wrong to me. And ChatGPT was able to explain why that was right in that context.
They are essentially a fun toy for most people, and an ok tool for people with the patience and training to get useful output from them. And they cost an insane amount of money to train and an insane amount of power to run.
Not to mention the other cost of training them, the human emotional cost. And the human cost of running them.
It just costs so much of a variety of things, for an output that has barely made anything better. Maybe they might get “better” in the future, and have to get through this stage to get there, but I’ve also seen a lot of people saying they appear to be starting to plateau… maybe a temporary plateau, but if so, how temporary? Could we just drop it for 10 years and start back up when they won’t be as inefficient? Maybe a law that they have to pay for everything they feed it, would effectively cause them to only emerge at a time when they are actually feasible.
I like LLMs. Instead of making a racket, I just use them, which may make it seem like everyone on Lemmy hates LLMs.
I love how everyone tries to jump on your comment after being called out and act like they don’t absolutely hate every stitch of it. But even in their excuses you can see the lies.