This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you say so, I have no reason to doubt you. But what does that say about the thought experiment I proposed? Are you saying that potentially the 1000th model could be significantly better than the first?
Yes, I think so, provided you were doing the training in a sophisticated way rather than solely training on the outputs of previous models without grading for quality or accuracy. You could get AIs to review the data for example for any errors or issues or have them work out a testing suite to check if the data is right. Data quality is very important, that and the right RL techniques are basically the two key things you need most to get right.
Microsoft Phi trains just on synthetic data and is very cost-efficient, that was its primary goal, making a good very small AI that can run on most PCs. But they curated the data a fair bit to make sure it was good.
In principle I think you could do the same for big first rate AIs too. It's just that it wouldn't be efficient to leave out human data and human curation (it's there, why not use it, the competition will) and you want something humans enjoy working with and not a schizo-sounding model. It'd be like o3 at its most alien but more so:
https://arxiv.org/html/2510.27338v1
Like wtf does that mean? Who knows? This is an artifact from inhuman RL processes. The inhuman RL processes work, that's why they're used.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link