And that just leaves o3 as the new-language thing, from which I’ve already updated
Again, literally no one is arguing for an ex nihilo new language. The argument is repeatedly about whether you get semantic drift “by default”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if models learn to embellish words with slightly more formal meanings
I’m not clear if you haven’t read the post in this case, but “embellish words with slightly more formal meanings” is just absolutely, empirically not what is happening. The linked post goes into this for multiple terms. (The content is in the linked section of that post)
And after looking at like, 100s of CoTs from models like Ling, Minimax, DS, and so on, I just haven’t gotten unintelligible / random seeming results in a way that “felt natural” to me. So… maybe I’m doing it wrong?
To be clear, a lot of nost’s arguments had a similar “I looked at a bunch of stuff” flavor. I’m pretty surprised that a lot of the points in the paper (for example the unusual terminology being extremely statistically common including on capabilities benchmarks) seem new to you, as you consistently have expressed strong opinions about this so I assumed you had arguments of why this fit your model.
But he thinks they look like spandrells anyway, as far as I know, so this means that regardless it’s the kind of thing you can just drop with a better training mechanism.
Okay but “phenomenon happens“ and “the vibe I get is that you could fix this with a better training mechanism” are extremely different claims.
Neither here nor there, but I’m really just interested in what’s the case here, and not in downstream effects. IMO this attitude (“will my results be politically useful to labs?”) has hurt a lot of technical work.
Yeah my point here was I haven’t seen any updating on empirical evidence. I assume this is because you just have very strong priors of your own on this, but it isn’t clear to me what emperical evidence you’d update on at this point. What would you expect to see if you were wrong here?
Again, literally no one is arguing for an ex nihilo new language. The argument is repeatedly about whether you get semantic drift “by default”.
I’m not clear if you haven’t read the post in this case, but “embellish words with slightly more formal meanings” is just absolutely, empirically not what is happening. The linked post goes into this for multiple terms. (The content is in the linked section of that post)
To be clear, a lot of nost’s arguments had a similar “I looked at a bunch of stuff” flavor. I’m pretty surprised that a lot of the points in the paper (for example the unusual terminology being extremely statistically common including on capabilities benchmarks) seem new to you, as you consistently have expressed strong opinions about this so I assumed you had arguments of why this fit your model.
Okay but “phenomenon happens“ and “the vibe I get is that you could fix this with a better training mechanism” are extremely different claims.
Yeah my point here was I haven’t seen any updating on empirical evidence. I assume this is because you just have very strong priors of your own on this, but it isn’t clear to me what emperical evidence you’d update on at this point. What would you expect to see if you were wrong here?