It’s not obvious to me why training LLMs on synthetic data produced by other LLMs wouldn’t work (up to a point). Under the model where LLMs are gradient-descending their way into learning algorithms that predict tokens that are generated by various expressions of causal structure in the universe, tokens produced by other LLMs don’t seem redundant with respect to the data used to train those LLMs. LLMs seem pretty different from most other things in the universe, including the data used to train them! It would surprise me if the algorithms that LLMs developed to predict non-LLM tokens were perfectly suited for predicting other LLM tokens “for free”.
It’s not obvious to me why training LLMs on synthetic data produced by other LLMs wouldn’t work (up to a point). Under the model where LLMs are gradient-descending their way into learning algorithms that predict tokens that are generated by various expressions of causal structure in the universe, tokens produced by other LLMs don’t seem redundant with respect to the data used to train those LLMs. LLMs seem pretty different from most other things in the universe, including the data used to train them! It would surprise me if the algorithms that LLMs developed to predict non-LLM tokens were perfectly suited for predicting other LLM tokens “for free”.