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Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

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11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#11

It's funny how generative AI has cast 'numeric' ML into the shadows as traditional ML in such a short space of time.

Just like NNs did to symbolic AI which is sorely missed to build explainable and ethical systems.

> ethical systems

I don't think symbolic AI has much to do with ethics? My impression is that ethics in this space are primarily concerned with the application of these technologies, especially when their deficiencies and biases are known.

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#12

RLHF is a very important part of the training process. Without it, the LLMs would definitely behave much more similar to a glorified autocomplete than something resembling "intelligence". So the answer is that if you just feed it a bunch of data, it might be good at spitting out some similarly looking data but ultimately has little use. If you manage to get some experts sitting with it and give it instructions and ex…

Isn't RLHF for building _chatbots_ over LLMs (and not part of LLMs themselves)?

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#13

It's funny how generative AI has cast 'numeric' ML into the shadows as traditional ML in such a short space of time.

Just like NNs did to symbolic AI which is sorely missed to build explainable and ethical systems.

The difference is NN are on the same side of the fence as GenAI regarding The Bitter Lesson, and Symbolic AI (my favorite topic in CS as a whole) is on the other

By this I mean there are plenty of scalable, even gigantic, practical uses of NNs popping all around leveraging available data and cheap compute. But not for handdrawn expert systems of old

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#14
There are some robotics researchers trying to frame robotics tasks as sequences of action and sensor tokens, giving the model all the data collected by the robot and the actions taken by the robot, so that the model can learn to predict the action tokens based on sensor info. Here's a blog post from a researcher in this field reviewing a relevant paper: https://evjang.com/2023/06/22/robocat.html

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#15
post #12

RLHF is a very important part of the training process. Without it, the LLMs would definitely behave much more similar to a glorified autocomplete than something resembling "intelligence". So the answer is that if you just feed it a bunch of data, it might be good at spitting out some similarly looking data but ultimately has little use. If you manage to get some experts sitting with it and give it instructions and ex…

Isn't RLHF for building _chatbots_ over LLMs (and not part of LLMs themselves)?

RLHF is where the model reaches out to people when it's not confident of the output. It's good because it makes the model 'push into' classes the model is weak on.

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like NNs did to symbolic AI which is sorely missed to build explainable and ethical systems.

> ethical systems I don't think symbolic AI has much to do with ethics? My impression is that ethics in this space are primarily concerned with the application of these technologies, especially when their deficiencies and biases are known.

Symbolic AI is human-understandable. It's programmed in human terms. The reasoning chain is transparent. An engineer can point at the graph and tell you exactly what factored into the AI's decision and how it was made. That (potentially) alleviates concerns about transparency, error, and bias.

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#17

We (I included) have been doing this EXACT thing for a long with with the stock market. We take ALL the data, build a model, then ask for an output buy/sell signal. The idea for using this type of model, from quants, was applied to language, THAT was the new idea. Now it sounds like you are saying "what if" we took a step backwards, but again, we this is exactly how we use these models now, is trained on data.

Sorry, but are you suggesting that transformers have been used by quants prior to the language application? LLM these days implies a transformer architecture.

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#18
Look up autoregressive model. There are already forecasting models that do something like this. I don't know if any use attention, it seems like a pretty obvious thing to have done. Overall this isn't a new idea.

Deep learning generally brings a lot less to tabular data because the underlying thing being modelled is much simpler compared to language models that effectively are modeling the human mind + culture so there's a lot more to fit the model to.

Re: Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens

#19
post #14

There are some robotics researchers trying to frame robotics tasks as sequences of action and sensor tokens, giving the model all the data collected by the robot and the actions taken by the robot, so that the model can learn to predict the action tokens based on sensor info. Here's a blog post from a researcher in this field reviewing a relevant paper: https://evjang.com/2023/06/22/robocat.html

For more on this, checkout Abeel's Decision Transformer paper from a few years ago that helped spring up some of this research.
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