alt Hacker News> LMs don't do this. Instead, every question is immediately responded with extreme confidence with a paragraph or more of text.
Having just read a load of Quora answers like this, which did not cover the thing I was looking for, that is how humans on the internet behave and how people have to write books, blog posts, articles, documentation. Without the "dance" to choose a path through a topic on the fly, the author has to take the burden of providing all relevant context, choosing a path, explaining why, and guessing at any objections and questions and including those as well.
It's why "this could have been an email" is a bad shout. The summary could have been an email, but the bit which decided on that being the summary would be pages of guessing all the things which what might have been in the call and which ones to include or exclude.
Replies
Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.
This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?
That's part of it, but I think another part is just the way the LLMs are tuned. They're capable of more conversational tones, but human feedback in post-training biases them toward a writing style that's more of a Quora / StackOverflow / Reddit Q&A style because that's what gets the best ratings during the RLHF process.
This is a recent phenomenon. It seems most of the pages today are SEO optimized LLM garbage with the aim of having you scroll past three pages of ads.
THe internet really used to be efficient and i could always find exactly what i wanted with an imprecise google search ~ 15 years ago.