Technology

Here’s a basic description of how (a part of) LLMs work: https://huggingface.co/learn/nlp-course/chapter1/6

LLMs are generating texts word for word (or token by token if you’re pedantic). This is why ChatGPT is slowly generating the response word by word instead of giving you the entire response at once.

Same applies during the training phase. It gets a piece of text and the word it’s supposed to predict. Then it’s tuned to improve its chances to predict the right word based on the text it’s given.

Ideally it’s supposed to make predictions by learning the patterns of the language. This is not always the case. Sometimes it can just memorize the answer instead of learning why (just like how a child can memorize the multiplication table without understanding multiplication). This is formally known as overfitting, which is a machine learning 101 concept.

There are ways to mitigate overfitting, but there’s no silver bullet solution. Sometimes it cannot help to memorize the training data.

When GitHub Copilot was new people quickly figured out it could generate the fast inverse square root implementation from Quake. Word for word. Including the “what the fuck” comment. It had memorized it completely.

I’m not sure how much OpenAI has done to mitigate this issue. But it’s a thing that can happen. It’s not imaginary.