But like, I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, someone trained something that performed comparably to LLMs on a wide variety of benchmarks, using much less “data”… and then when you look into it, you find that what they were doing was taking activations of the LLMs and training the smaller guy on the activations. And I’ll be like, come on, that’s not the point; you could just as well have “trained” the smaller guy by copy-pasting the weights from the LLM and claimed “trained with 0 data!!”. And you’ll be like “but we met your criterion!” and I’ll just be like “well whatever, it’s obviously not relevant to the point I was making, and if you can’t see that then why are we even having this conversation”. (Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, IDK, but this sort of thing—followed by being accused of “moving the goal posts”—is why this question feels frustrating to answer.)
But like, I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, someone trained something that performed comparably to LLMs on a wide variety of benchmarks, using much less “data”… and then when you look into it, you find that what they were doing was taking activations of the LLMs and training the smaller guy on the activations. And I’ll be like, come on, that’s not the point; you could just as well have “trained” the smaller guy by copy-pasting the weights from the LLM and claimed “trained with 0 data!!”. And you’ll be like “but we met your criterion!” and I’ll just be like “well whatever, it’s obviously not relevant to the point I was making, and if you can’t see that then why are we even having this conversation”. (Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, IDK, but this sort of thing—followed by being accused of “moving the goal posts”—is why this question feels frustrating to answer.)