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by nullc 375 days ago
I've encountered this myself. After stripping out the finger-wagging and moralizing ("safety") output from openorca I found that models fine tuned on it still adopted the same kind of paternalistic and politically loaded behaviors of gpt3/gpt4 that the base models lacked.

I considered it similar to how adversarial noise works in image classification-- that the training data is very high dimensional and small bits of noise in it can concentrate and flip internal states while training. And these turn out to be pretty robust, even when created against different models so long as the training corpus is similar.

This is probably particularly true in that "predict internet text" requires the model to have some internal state reflecting the kind of person its text is predicting-- is it a child, a news broadcaster, a government notice, a foo-wing concern troll... and so the behavior shift may require only a fairly small change deep inside the model.