Reddit is OpenAI’s moat • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#61

Post by refulgentis » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #28

JimtheCoder wrote: post #9

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I…

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in…

Simple: get the search results, have LLM read and evaluate them.

It's devilishly difficult to get citations in there, you're not going to do it with langchain, but its possible (c.f. Bing).

Python x langchain x LLMs makes it very easy to create demos so there's been an initial influx of meh stuff, I'm very excited for 6 months from now.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#62

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

The leaked Google memo "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" is instructive here:

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

Original author is an ML researcher, and the crux of his argument is that most weights in a LLM are significantly overdetermined. Once you have ingested several terabytes of natural language, you know how to generate natural language.

The remaining misses are facts that it has never seen, usually because they are so obvious that nobody thinks to write them down explicitly. And so more training data doesn't necessarily help LLM performance, unless you're either ingesting either extremely basic facts that are so obvious most adult discourse overlooks them, or you're ingesting expert knowledge that's highly specific and only discussed in a few forums. Reddit data could perhaps help with the latter, but a.) Reddit is usually not the place to go for expert discourse and b.) there are other better sources of data for it. You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit.

Also the LLaMa/RedPajama approach makes this stupidly easy, because you can pass around patch sets to the model trained on specific mini-corpora, and then update the weights appropriately. Hence why the author of the Google memo believes neither Google nor OpenAI has a viable moat.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#63

Post by whywhywhywhy » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #28

JimtheCoder wrote: post #9

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I…

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in…

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search

If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer

With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answer is appearing right away.

Of course I understand ChatGPT shouldn't be used for this because it will lie to you and make things up. But I am saying that's why you'll see people who don't know that preferring it over Google.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#64

Post by duxup » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches?

Is it?

When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations.

Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic.

For example the networking topics often were “small shop” focused and users unaware of very common enterprise level practices, and when they saw someone mention it they would react really poorly. The result was advice tailored to small shops that have limited staff, so you got ideas that “work” but would perform poorly at scale (at best) and at times could present security risks, miss opportunities where more performance was needed, better solutions were available with a sizable staff and planning. They weren’t wrong, but the answers were skewed.

Subreddits are weird, they might be about a topic but the community often moves that topic/ has a specific pov within that topic… people without those views tend to abandon those subs and those who remain aren’t necessarily “right”. Reddit isn’t stack overflow where being correct is at least on the surface valued where we can run code and see if it works. Top answer on Reddit could be wrong and anyone taking issue with it may simply not answer. Heck there are whole subreddits dedicated to wallowing in misinformation…

Now I don’t know if Q&A is the start and end of LLM training (not my area of expertise at all, I am open to the possibility that what I’m talking about isn’t a problem at all) but Reddit as a source makes me wonder what the results would be.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#65

Post by fnovd » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

Maybe if reddit developed some expertise in using all of the user data they have to tag, categorize, annotate every comment, they would have something of value to provide. Their recent actions only angered users and won't stop future LLMs from using their data for the reasons many others here have noted.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#66

Post by jononor » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #17

JimtheCoder wrote: post #9

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I…

Seriously hope OpenAI is stripping all the canned meme replies that go on for hundreds of sub threads and end up as the top comments in threads before they train their models. How would you even do that reliably?

Label data and build a meme classifier? Does not have to be perfect to be useful. But yeah, data curation is probably a huge endeavor at the companies making Language model that are fit for production. Like in practically all applications of Machine Learning.

But the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is also one of the key tools to getting useful outputs.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#67

Post by sebzim4500 » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

JimtheCoder wrote: post #9

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I…

The point isn't really to discover the opinions of redditors, it is to ingest the 'common sense' things that you would never find out from reading scientific papers or even books.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#68

Post by c22 » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

Weryj wrote: post #45

bzmrgonz wrote: post #20

I agree wholeheartedly with this ... and given Microsoft's trail of corporate bodies in its wake.. I wouldn't put it passed them to be orchestrating the cutting of all data-lakes for AI training, especially a clean and pre-processed source like Reddit. if data is water that corporations drink(which it is).. REDDIT is like finding a naturally occurring spring of Perrier water(by natural, I mean, we are the ants who br…

I would like to be compensated for the digital oil I've produced.

You can be compensated the same way we compensate the earth for real oil: by burning your output to create a toxic environment for you to exist in.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#69

Post by zuppy » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

boredumb wrote: post #24

JimtheCoder wrote: post #9

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I…

You are absolutely right minority or not. I actively avoid reddit because the majority of users there. The fact we're seeing government agencies start treading into using GPT models is frightening. We could find ourselves in a tragic comedy where all of the massive institutions and enterprises around us are addressing their serious issues via redditors by proxy.

depends of where you go on reddit. i've learned a lot of things for my hobbies. for example r/espresso and r/roasting are a source of good information. there are also places like r/askhistorians and many many otheres. reddit is not just r/funny.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#70

Post by ltadeut » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

skilled wrote: post #53

eggbrain wrote: post #42

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to thei…

I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched. A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenev…

> , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model.

How would that work from a legal perspective, though?

Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?