This sort of ‘it’s probably in the dataset’ thinking is a bit of a relic from the ‘stochastic parrot’ era of LLM critique.
Reinforcement learning doesn’t work by training an LLM on a series of inputs like ‘rewrite python in befunge’ paired with a prepared model implementation. It doesn’t matter if an open source implementation was in the dataset that trained the language model. All it got from that was an appreciation for syntax and language idiom; when it is generating code it’s doing so according to the approaches and patterns that it’s been reinforced into following in the context of a coding prompt - regurgitating existing codebases is undesirable so it is a behavior it will have been reinforced against.
alt Hacker News
This sort of ‘it’s probably in the dataset’ thinking is a bit of a relic from the ‘stochastic parrot’ era of LLM critique.
Reinforcement learning doesn’t work by training an LLM on a series of inputs like ‘rewrite python in befunge’ paired with a prepared model implementation. It doesn’t matter if an open source implementation was in the dataset that trained the language model. All it got from that was an appreciation for syntax and language idiom; when it is generating code it’s doing so according to the approaches and patterns that it’s been reinforced into following in the context of a coding prompt - regurgitating existing codebases is undesirable so it is a behavior it will have been reinforced against.