alt Hacker NewsSynthetic training data is carefully crafted by humans. The rare geniuses of human history use a different magnitude and configuration of the same kind of human intelligence that posted a dad joke on a site that got scraped into the training set and repeated, convincing people that it is intelligent like humans.
> that you wouldn't otherwise dismiss as non-intelligent rehashing of the same tired patterns they always inhabit were those same actions attributed to LLMs?
Regardless of whether something's been done before people still come up with them on their own without directly copying or amalgamating several copies. Pretty much every skilled profession includes figuring things out on the fly through the use of general reasoning that doesn't involve pattern matching against millions of examples.
> Synthetic training data is carefully crafted by humans.
Much, if not the majority of synthetic data is AI generated. Human experts then evaluate samples of the data, but nothing like the entire corpus which can be trillions of tokens of generated material.
See here where Qwen team discusses synthesizing trillions of tokens for their pre training dataset - https://arxiv.org/html/2505.09388v1
> The rare geniuses of human history use a different magnitude and configuration of the same kind of human intelligence
I agree. What I don’t see any strong evidence for is that this intelligence is unique to humans. Nor do I see how it could ever be anything other than recombinations of existing data with random mutation. Where else would the building blocks for each invention come from, divine insight? We build on the shoulders of giants etc etc
Worth noting, as a sidebar, that we’re having this discussion on a post mentioning a novel breakthrough made by AI over a topic that many brilliant human mathematicians including Erdos himself failed to do.
> Regardless of whether something's been done before people still come up with them on their own without directly copying or amalgamating several copies.
I’m not even saying it in the “there’s nothing new under the sun” sense.
If you follow an average person’s day from beginning to end. Let’s say in Bangkok or NYC or Paris, at which part of the day are they not simply repeating a variation of something they’ve done many times before, or seen others around them do before, or read about others doing before, or heard about others doing before, watched others do before on TV etc etc
What you have left, how is it distinguishable, without reasoning backwards from the desired conclusion of human exceptionalism, from turning up the temperature on an LLM query?
How many data points does a human parse when they attempt to stand up as a toddler? Sight, sound, sensation from every limb and body part, inner ear, internal thought processes at the time conscious and unconscious related to the moment and attempting to interpret it in relation to all that it’s experienced to this point, including all prior attempts and whatever retained associated data, a hard to even comprehend stream of data, coming in continuously over however many minutes, hours, etc of attempts.
The stream of data the brain is processing from both external and internal sources from birth is incredibly rich, and if we attempted to represent the full depth of it it would far outweigh the size of any corpus models are being trained on now.
I think what may be genuinely missing from AI is the type of data that doesn’t translate completely into text. The audio and images/video we feed in are a totally incomplete slice of the POV of say even a single average human through their lifetime, and bereft of all the associated data a human has access to in the moment (sensory etc).
I think this tends more towards the world models that Yann Lecun et al are promoting as the key to more capable AI.