this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It's one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.
I've read it is still well valued because people will keep asking questions there when LLM can't answer, so they remain a precious source of post LLM curated Q&A.
...for now.
Until it's just AIs answering questions asked by other AIs while human admins block human accounts..
Solaria, here we come.
Just started reading Foundation, it's very well written.
Isaac Asimov should be required reading for everyone.
Right? We have to read Shakespeare and Dickens, boring. So far, Foundation has had actually unexpected things happening and it engaging.
Valuable information source becomes bot recycling machine..? Hey, I Reddit before!
Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of "synthetic data" to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.
It can reproduce an api. Can't solve actual problems. LLMs are completely incapable of innovation.
That's not really true though.. They come up with brand new sentences all the time.
No, they can only take from things in their models.
Moreover, all of them use statistics, typically Bayesian, to get the results. What you get from an LLM is essentially an average* of the model data. This is why feeding LLM output into a model is so toxic, it's already the average.
They only take from the statistical distributions of words in the context of preceding words (which is why they never say "the the" etc, why the grammar is nearly always correct). But that doesn't mean that whole sentences are lifted from the source material. There are near infinite paths through those word distributions, and many have never been produced by humans, so LLMs do produce sentences that have never been uttered before.
They couldn't produce new conceptual context spaces in the way that humans can sometimes, but they can produce new combinations within existing context spaces.
Except they are. You ask about Discworld characters and it gives you direct full quotes from the books.
You realise "LLMs can quote verbatim" is not a contractdiction of "LLMs can create brand new sentences", right?
It can but you to closely midwife it into doing so.
And yet the synthetic training data works, and models trained on it continue scoring higher on the benchmarks than ones trained on raw Internet data. Claim what you want about it, the results speak louder.
The results aren't worth the expense. So-called "AI" is the biggest bubble since the great recession.
Nah, I'm still giving that one to the blockchain. LLMs are going to be useful for a while, but Ethereum still hasn't figured out a real use, and they're the only ones that haven't given up and moved fully into coin gambling.
Blockchain currencies aren't a bubble, they're a scam.
This is the peak, though. They require new data to get better but most of the available new data is adulterated with AI slop. Once they start eating themselves it's over.
You are speaking of "model collapse", I take it? That doesn't happen in the real world with properly generated and curated synthetic data. Model collapse has only been demonstrated in highly artificial circumstances where many generations of model were "bred" exclusively on the outputs of previous generations, without the sort of curation and blend of additional new data that real-world models are trained with.
There is no sign that we are at "the peak" of AI development yet.
We're already seeing signs of incestuous data input causing damage. The more that AI takes over, the less capable it will be.
Are we, though? Newer models almost universally perform better than older ones, adjusted for scale. What signs are you seeing?
That might be true if any human could reasonably ask a question there now. Ask a question, and you are likely going to see it removed for a variety of reasons.
To be honest, I had a bad experience a few years ago when I wanted to try contributing, and I never tried again. Yet, I think it's really hard to strike a balance of freedom and constrains for organically curated Q&A, so I try not to be too fast on judging them considering the service that they indubitably provided to millions of people.
Time to boycott the platform!
I haven't really had an issue with SA toxicity.