logoalt Hacker News

mike_hearn • yesterday at 6:49 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

The models in agreement here are all the frontier labs. I don't believe Google is distilling Anthropic or Anthropic is distilling OpenAI.

I don't think we're seeing averages or obvious fix points in the dataset. People went looking for the origins of Elias the Lighthouse Keeper and couldn't find one. Nobody predicted this outcome, it was discovered. It's a weirdly specific character and name choice, one that isn't obviously dictated by "the training set" (whatever that is), and yet they all reached the same place. How can such an obscure point in latent space be optimal for every model??


Replies

pixl97 • yesterday at 7:25 PM

>How can such an obscure point in latent space be optimal for every model??

While I don't have any evidence based answers here, this could be some interesting mathematical artifact of the set of human knowledge and platonic algorithms.

Kind of like how carcinization turns some animals into similar shapes and forms, maybe there are just weird algorithmic shapes that emerge from how we use language. Of course we'd need to see more of these in different languages other than English to see if they disappear in some languages or appear more often in others.

This is just another one of those things about LLMs that we have no idea why it happens, and there are so many others already. And when you look at the pace things are progressing it seems we're building up new questions like this far faster than we are getting answers for them.

ctoth • yesterday at 6:56 PM

Didn't Elias come from WildChat?

➕ show 1 reply