Why are we training AIs on reddit posts instead of Research Papers? We could be saving the world!
Why are we training AIs on reddit posts instead of Research Papers? We could be saving the world!
Who is "we"? My understanding is LLMs are mostly being trained on a large amount of publicly available texts, including both reddit posts and research papers.
I bet the first and only research paper fed is that infamous one about vaccines and autism
Short answer: they already are
Slightly longer answer: GPT models like ChatGPT are part of an experiment in "if we train the AI model on shedloads of data does it make a more powerful AI model?" and after OpenAI made such big waves every company is copying them including trying to train models similar to ChatGPT rather than trying to innovate and do more
Even longer answer: There's tons of different AI models out there for doing tons of different things. Just look at the over 1 million models on Hugging Face (a company which operates as a repository for AI models among other services) and look at all of the different types of models you can filter for on the left.
Training an image generation model on research papers probably would make it a lot worse at generating pictures of cats, but training a model that you want to either generate or process research papers on existing research papers would probably make a very high quality model for either goal.
More to your point, there's some neat very targeted models with smaller training sets out there like Microsoft's PHI-3 model which is primarily trained on textbooks
As for saving the world, I'm curious what you mean by that exactly? These generative text models are great at generating text similar to their training data, and summarization models are great at summarizing text. But ultimately AI isn't going to save the world. Once the current hype cycle dies down AI will be a better known and more widely used technology, but ultimately its just a tool in the toolbox.
also the answer to that question, shitloads of data for a better ai, is yes… with logarithmic returns. massively underpriced (by cost to generate) returns that have questionable value statement at best.
I find it amusing that everyone is answering the question with the assumption that the premise of OP's question is correct. You're all hallucinating the same way that an LLM would.
LLMs are rarely trained on a single source of data exclusively. All the big ones you find will have been trained on a huge dataset including Reddit, research papers, books, letters, government documents, Wikipedia, GitHub, and much more.
Example datasets:
Rules of lemmy
Ignore facts, don’t do research to see if the comment/post is correct, don’t look at other comments to see if anyone else has corrected the post/comment already, there is only one right side (and that is the side of the loudest group)
They are. T&F recently cut a deal with Microsoft. Without author's consent, of course.
I'm fairly sure a few others have too, but that's the only article I could find quickly.
"AI" is a parlor trick. Very impressive at first, then you realize there isn't much to it that is actually meaningful. It regurgitates language patterns, patterns in images, etc. It can make a great Markov chain. But if you want to create an "AI" that just mines research papers, it will be unable to do useful things like synthesize information or describe the state of a research field. It is incapable of critical or analytical approaches. It will only be able to answer simple questions with dubious accuracy and to summarize texts (also with dubious accuracy).
Let's say you want to understand research on sugar and obesity using only a corpus from peer reviewed articles. You want to ask something like, "what is the relationship between sugar and obesity?". What will LLMs do when you ask this question? Well, they will just attempt to do associations and to construct reasonable-sounding sentences based on their set of research articles. They might even just take an actual semtence from an article and reframe it a little, just like a high schooler trying to get away with plagiarism. But they won't be able to actually mechanistically explain the overall mechanisms and will fall flat on their face when trying to discern nonsense funded by food lobbies from critical research. LLMs do not think or criticize. Of they do produce an answer that suggests controversy it will be because they either recognized diversity in the papers or, more likely, their corpus contains reviee articles that criticize articles funded by the food industry. But it will be unable to actually criticize the poor work or provide a summary of the relationship between sugar and obesity based on any actual understanding that questions, for example, whether this is even a valid question to ask in the first place (bodies are not simple!). It can only copy and mimic.
They might even just take an actual semtence from an article and reframe it a little
Case for many things that can be answered via stackoverflow searches. Even the order in which GPT-4o brings up points is the exact same as SO answers or comments.
Yeah it's actually one of the ways I caught a previous manager using AI for their own writing (things that should not have been done with AI). They were supposed to write about something in a hyper-specific field and an entire paragraph ended up just being a rewording of one of two (third party) website pages that discuss this topic directly.
Why does everyone keep calling them Markov chains? They're missing
all the required properties, includingthe eponymous Markovian property. Wouldn't it be more correct to call them stochastic processes?Edit: Correction, turns out the only difference between a stochastic process and a Markov process is the Markovian property. It's literally defined as "stochastic process but Markovian".
Who's going to peer review that?
AI isn't saving the world lol
Machine learning has some pretty cool potential in certain areas, especially in the medical field. Unfortunately the predominant use of it now is slop produced by copyright laundering shoved down our throats by every techbro hoping they'll be the next big thing.
It's marketing hype, even in the name. It isn't "AI" as decades of the actual AI field would define it, but credulous nerds really want their cyberpunkerino fantasies to come true so they buy into the hype label.
The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.
I don't get the "it's not really AI" point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That's the sci-fi "artificial person" variety, which LLMs aren't able to manage. But that's just a subset of AI.
Saving the world isn't profitable in the short term.
Vulture capitalists don't care about the future. They care about the immediate. Short term profitability. And nothing else.
Both are happening. Samples of casual writing are more valuable to use to generate an article than research papers though.
Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and "talk" to them. Both are valuable.
Training it on research papers wouldn’t make it smarter, it would just make it better at mimicking their writing style.
Don’t fall for the hype.
Because AI needs a lot of training data to reliably generate something appropriate. It's easier to get millions of reddit posts than millions of research papers.
Even then, LLMs simply generate text but have no idea what the text means. It just knows those words have a high probability of matching the expected response. It doesn't check that what was generated is factual.
You could feed all the research papers in the world to an LLM and it will still have zero understanding of what you trained it on. It will still make shit up, it can't save the world.
They already do that. You're being a troglodyte.
Hmmm. Not sure if I'm being insulted. Is that one of those fish fossils that looks kind of like a horseshoe crab?
You're thinking of a trilobite
Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more noun (especially in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave. a hermit. a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.
Redditors are always right, peer reviewed papers always wrong. Pretty obvious really. :D
Dank memes > science
- tech bros, probably
Because scientific journals are paywalled - gibberish on Reddit is free*.
*Content is free unless you get caught and sued.
Because they are looking for conversations.
This is a damn good question!
Papers are most importantly a documentation of exactly what and how a procedure was performed, adding a vagueness filter over that is only going to decrease its value infinitely.
Real question is why are we using generative ai at all (gets money out of idiot rich people)
The Ghost of Aaron Schwartz
What he was fighting for was an awful lot more important than a tool to write your emails while causing a ginormous tech bubble.
They're trained on technical material too.
Anyone running a webserver and looking at their logs will know AI is being trained on EVERYTHING. There are so many crawlers for AI that are literally ripping the internet wholesale. Reddit just got in on charging the AI companies for access to freely contributed content. For everyone else, they're just outright stealing it.
It won't worm. Autocomplete can't make new information.
We are. I just read an article yesterday about how Microsoft paid research publishers so they could use the papers to train AI, with or without the consent of the papers' authors. The publishers also reduced the peer review window so they could publish papers faster and get more money from Microsoft. So... expect AI to be trained on a lot of sloppy, poorly-reviewed research papers because of corporate greed.
I saw an article about one trained on research papers. (Built by Meta, maybe?) It also spewed out garbage: it would make up answers that mimicked the style of the papers but had its own fabricated content! Something about the largest nuclear reactor made of cheese in the world...
Nobody wants an AI that talks like that.
I kind of think my question is WHY ARE WE FOCUSING ON TALKING TO IT?
Because "ai" ad we colloquially know today are language models: they train on and can produce language, that's what they are designed on. Yes, they can produce images and also videos, but they don't have any form of real knowledge or understanding, they only predict the next word or the next pixel based on their prompt and their vast examples of words and images. You can only talk to them because that's what they are for.
Feeding research papers will make it spit research-sounding words, which probably will contain some correct information, but at best an llm trained on that would be useful to search through existing research, it would not be able to make new one
Because that's what it's designed for? I'm curious what else it could be good for. A machine capable of independent, intelligent research sounds like a totally different invention entirely.
Part of it is the same "human speech" aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because... that should be obvious.
This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to "This youtuber sounds smug" or "They are presenting their opinion as fact" then you see why people prefer "natural human speech" over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.
And... while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.
But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.
Tons of people already are. The following site is useful for searching papers using ai https://consensus.app/
Thank you! That was thoughtful
I think I read this post wrong.
I was thinking the sentence "We could be saving the world!" meant 'we' as in humans only.
No need to be training AI. No need to do anything with AI at all. Humans simply start saving the world. Our Research Papers can train on Reddit. We cannot be training, we are saving the world. Let the Research Papers run a train on Reddit AI. Humanity Saves World.
No cynical replies please.
Brain damage is cheaper than professionals
How does that help disempower the fossil fuel mafia?
AuroraGPT. They are trying to do it.
Its cause number of people who can read, understand, and then create the necessary dataset to train and test the LLM are very very very few for research papers vs the data for pop culture is easilier to source.
Because broken English from research paper and relatively structured style will be even worse than reddit posts
Came to wonder about this.
The few I've seen weren't shining examples of the language, and could have used some editing.
As well, the rumours abound that a lot of papers are available before review, and that's likely to cause some harm if we trust a model predicting on bad data.
(Yes, I know: reddit isn't going to be better; but it has its own warning because, well, Reddit)
money. theres no money in saving the world. lots of money in not saving the world.
greed will be humanities downfall
Most research papers are likely ad valid as an average reddit point.
Getting published is a circlejerk, and rarely are they properly tested, or does anyone actually read them.
Who says they’re not?
Those research papers are expensive to procure ethically, I'd imagine