Technology

This is a really fantastic explanation of the issue!

It's more like improv comedy with an extremely adaptable comic than a conversation with a real person.

One of the things that I've noticed is that the training/finetuning that's done in order to make it give good completions to the "helpful ai conversation scenario" is that it flattens a lot of the capabilities of the underlying language model for really interesting and specific completions. I remember playing around with gpt2 in it's native text completion mode, and even with that much weaker model, it was able to complete a much larger variety of text styles without sliding into the sameness and slickness of the current chat model fine-tuning.

A lot of the research that I read on LLMs is using them in the original token completion context, but pretty much the only way people interact with them is through a thick layer of ai chatbot improv. As an example for code, I imagine that one would have more success using an LLM to edit your code if the context that you give it starts out written like it is a review of a pull request for the code, or some other commentary of a form that matches the way that code is reviewed in the training data. But instead of having access to create that context directly, we have to ask for code review through the fogged window of a chat between an AI assistant and a person discussing code. And that form of chat likely isn't well represented in the training data.