They could stick to unpoisoned datasets for next token prediction by simply not including data collected after the public release of ChatGPT.
But the real progress they can make is that LLMs can be subjected to reinforcement learning, the same process that got superhuman results in Go, Starcraft, and other games. The difficulty is getting a training signal that can guide it past human-level performance.
And this is why they are pushing to include ChatGPT in everything. Every conversation is a datapoint that can be used to evaluate ChatGPT’s performance. This doesn’t get poisoned by the public adoption of AI because even if ChatGPT is speaking to an AI, the RL training algorithm evaluates ChatGPT’s behavior, treating the AI as just another possible thing-in-the-world it can interact with.
As AI chatbots proliferate, more and more opportunities arise for A/B testing - for example if two different AI chatbots write two different comments to the same reddit post, with the goal of getting the most upvotes. While it’s not quite the same as the billions of games playing against each other in a vacuum that made AlphaGo and AlphaStar better than humans, there is definitely opportunity for training data.
And at some point they could find a way to play AI against each other to reach greater heights, some test that is easy to evaluate despite being based on complicated next-token-prediction. They’ve got over a trillion dollars of funding and plenty of researchers doing their best, and I don’t see a physical reason why it couldn’t happen.
But beyond any theoretical explanation, there is the simple big-picture argument: for the past 10 years I’ve heard people say that AI could never do the next thing, with increasing desperation as AI swallows up more and more of the internet. They have all had reasons about as credible-sounding as yours. Sure it’s possible that at some point the nay-sayers will be right and the technology will taper off, but we don’t have the luxury of assuming we live in the easiest of all possible worlds.
It may be true that 3 years from now all digital communication is swallowed up by AI that we can’t distinguish from humans, that try to feed us information optimized to convert us to fascism on behalf of the AI’s fascist owners. It may be true that there will be mass-produced drones that are as good as maneuvering around obstacles and firing weapons as humans and these drones will be applied against anyone who resists the fascist order.
We may be only years away from resistance to fascism becoming impossible. We can bet that we have longer, but only if we get something that is worth the wait.
Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.
The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.
They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.
They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.
And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.
The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.