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Anon1096yesterday at 7:43 PM3 repliesview on HN

Nah, I think this is a common misunderstanding of how LLMs work, where people think that they mimic the pre-training data. Stylistically everything you see is an artifact of post-training, which is from reinforcement learning not from absorbing mass amounts of text. At some point a person or more recently a bot gave a thumbs up to an A/B tested response including em-dashes and claudisms galore.


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kridsdale1yesterday at 7:59 PM

Yes. This completely explains sycophancy at least.

ModernMechyesterday at 7:59 PM

So question then, why is it so hard to make an ai that doesn’t do these things? And why do Claude and ChatGPT have the same -isms? They’re both doing the same a/b post training with the same decisions?

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avereveardyesterday at 8:29 PM

There's layers, some of token selection is fingerprinting https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text

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