alt Hacker NewsNah, I think this is a common misunderstanding of how LLMs work, where people think that they mimic the pre-training data. Stylistically everything you see is an artifact of post-training, which is from reinforcement learning not from absorbing mass amounts of text. At some point a person or more recently a bot gave a thumbs up to an A/B tested response including em-dashes and claudisms galore.
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Yes. This completely explains sycophancy at least.
So question then, why is it so hard to make an ai that doesn’t do these things? And why do Claude and ChatGPT have the same -isms? They’re both doing the same a/b post training with the same decisions?
There's layers, some of token selection is fingerprinting https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text
> Stylistically everything you see is an artifact of post-training,
It is still not exactly clear if it is true or not. Unless we have base "pt" snaphot of Claude we can't say one way or another. I've played a bit with base models of Nemo, Gemma etc and they all had tics, not much different from RLHFed instruct versions.