Which is why knowledge cut off date is important. I prefer if it is frozen to pre-ChatGPT-3.5. Anything post-ChatGPT-3.5 release date should be considered tainted - imagine the sheer number of articles generated by spammers who used ChatGPT.
Knowledge cut-off date doesn't prevent your model from getting tainted though - if you're doing any kind of RLHF, unless all your human reviewers were kept isolated from the world since ${knowledge-cutoff-date}, they will inadvertently give the model glimpses into the future.
It's not immediately apparent to people just how much leakage can happen this way. Up to a year ago, I'd probably give people this story[0] to ponder on, but now it's no longer a hypothetical - GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are clear, practical demonstrations of just how much knowledge is implicitly encoded in what we say or write, and how this knowledge can be teased out of the input data without any prior context, completely unsupervised, given sufficient time and effort (which in silico translates to "sufficient compute", which we already have).
That might be fair in the short term. However it's not a workable option long-term, or all such models will be very limited in their knowledge as humanity advances technologically and culturally.
If you want me to be honest with you, LLMs are themselves a short term approach and can get us to, at max, AGI levels (for this current era). I don't see us getting to ASI with just LLMs. For the sort of "emergent ability" that ASI requires it has to be something more "simpler" and the learning be more "virulent" / "instantaneous" (not sure if these words convey what I really want to convey). Otherwise, LLMs will always have a "maxima" at which point it fails. And that maxima is collective intelligence of all of humanity in the current epoch. If you go back a 1000 years, the collective intelligence of all humanity would be completely different (primitive even). Would LLMs trained on that data have produced Knowledge that we know today? I don't think so. It could still, theoretically, reach AGI for that era and accelerate pace of learning by 50-100 years at a time. LLMs will surely accelerate pace of learning (as tools) even now but by themselves won't reach ASI levels. For ASI, we really need something more simpler/fundamental that is yet to be discovered. I don't feel LLMs are the way to ASI. AGI? Yeah possible.
Same is true for humans - a scientist inventing everything from their head would not achieve much, but if they can conduct experiments, and if they persevere, they eventually make discoveries. A pure LLM is like the first case, a LLM with tools or part of a larger system is the second.
