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by mdemare 288 days ago
Yes. It is astonishing that LLMs can solve problems that only a handful of very smart teenagers can solve, but LLMs do it by consuming a million times as much content as those teenagers. Running out of data is not a reason for despair.

Also consider that during training LLMs spend much less time on processing, say, TAOCP (Knuth), or SICP (Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman), or Probability Theory (Jaynes) than on the entirety that is r/Frugal.

20 thick books turn a smart teenager into a graduate with a MSc. That's what, 10 million tokens?

When we read difficult, important texts, we reflect on them, make exercises, discuss them, etc. We don't know how to make an LLM do that in a way that improves it. Yet.