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Machine Learning

Do Humans Still Have a Role in the Era of Large Language Models and Generative AI

Large Language Models and Generative AI, less dependent on human supervision, are ascendant. Do humans still hold a role?

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Admon W.

In the fast-evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI), we're witnessing a paradigm shift – the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI that are less reliant on human supervision. This prompts a critical question: With these models requiring fewer human interventions in training, do humans still have a part to play?

A large language model (LLM) is a computerized language model, embodied by an artificial neural network

The Changing AI Landscape: The Rise of Large Language Models and Generative AI

Language intelligence isn't just knocking on our doors, it's already in the living room. From aiding in crafting engaging text, and enhancing analysis, to aiding day-to-day decisions, millions are reaping the benefits of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI. Intelligent search tools like the innovative New Bing and Google SGE are transforming the way we navigate the information highway. The swift adoption of ChatGPT has marked it as the fastest-adopted internet service in history.

ChatGPT won 100 million users in 2 months after its release
ChatGPT won 100 million users in 2 months after its release

Every month, fresh-off-the-oven language models are served up to the world. As of this writing, GPT holds its crown as the heavyweight champion amongst these models, earning its stripes as a Foundation Model in the industry. Behind this powerful moniker are billions of parameters, colossal training datasets (a trove of text data accumulated over years by humans on the internet), and a steep bill for training. The payoff has been remarkable. Foundation models have demonstrated intelligence that stretches the boundaries of our imagination. The AI journey has always been about automation, but recent breakthroughs are diminishing the need for human intervention. Models like GPT3, trained through unsupervised learning, have developed an uncanny understanding of natural languages. Unsupervised learning operates devoid of human-labeled answers: The AI uncovers patterns and relationships in raw data, unveiling insights that might be overlooked by human analysts. Instead of training with annotated data, GPT3 employs the next-token prediction approach, learning to complete sentences in the most contextually-logical manner. These techniques have spurred incredible advancements in LLMs and Gen AI. Fast forward to today, these models can mimic human writing and even generate code for a functional software program. However, the emergence of these self-sufficient training techniques has ignited a debate within the AI community and beyond. If LLMs can learn and create autonomously, what role remains for humans? This question is compelling and complex, with implications extending far beyond the confines of technology.

Hidden Challenges of Relying Solely on Self-sufficient Learning

While self-sufficient learning methods have played a starring role in the rise of powerhouse LLMs like GPT-3, an over-reliance on them sans human supervision can be a minefield of challenges:

  • Misrepresentation, misinterpretation, and lack of contextual understanding: Language is an intricate dance of symbols, innuendos, and nuances. When LLMs, trained solely on unsupervised learning, try to step onto this dance floor, they might stumble. Misrepresentation or misinterpretation of information can be a real risk, opening the door to potential misunderstandings or misinformation. Moreover, these models lack the human knack for posing clarifying questions or engaging in insightful dialogues to iron out ambiguities.

  • Inappropriate responses and inability to learn from feedback: In a world where instant feedback is often the key to improvement, unsupervised models may find themselves in a predicament. Without the ability to learn from real-time feedback, they lack the finesse of their supervised counterparts. This limitation can manifest as inappropriate or offensive responses, a particularly worrisome issue when dealing with sensitive topics or data-laden with offensive language.

  • Underutilization of expertise: Yes, unsupervised learning models like GPT excel at spinning human-like text. But they sometimes falter when it comes to generalization, which means they may not be as adept when faced with contexts or data that stray from their training data. Instead of overfitting, these models can sometimes be too literal in applying learnt patterns, which can curb their ability to yield truly original or contextually apt insights.

  • Bias, discrimination, and ethical concerns: If biased language or viewpoints sneak into the training data, the language model might unwittingly learn and perpetuate these biases, culminating in potentially discriminatory or offensive outputs. This shines a spotlight on the critical role of human oversight to ensure these models are wielded ethically, equitably, and responsibly.

In light of these potential pitfalls, human oversight and involvement in the training and deployment of LLMs is not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have. We bring to the table abilities that models still strive to emulate: complex decision-making, understanding of ethical and societal impacts, creative problem-solving abilities, and more. We serve as quality gatekeepers, bias mitigators, domain experts, and ethical overseers.

The Human Factor in LLM Training

So, as we venture into the exciting landscape of LLMs, it's important to remember this balance. By pairing the autonomy of unsupervised learning with the oversight of human influence, we can navigate the challenges and ensure the development of models that are not just effective and accurate, but also ethical, fair, and responsible.

Humans still play a vital role in the training of large language models

Data Collection, Preparation, and Labeling

The birth of LLM training heavily leans on human prowess in data collection, preparation, and labeling. The tasks of choosing data sources, ensuring data diversity, pre-processing data, and defining labels for annotation are where humans shine, laying a solid foundation for the training journey. Human labelers are invaluable for supervised learning tasks, taking a deep dive into tasks that require human comprehension, like sentiment analysis. They also play a pivotal role in refining the dataset, removing noise, and errors, which bolsters the reliability of the trained model. The resulting annotated data provides a single source of truth, enabling the comparison of metrics like precision, recall, or F1 score between models.

Quality Assurance, Bias Mitigation, and Ethical Oversight

Throughout and beyond the training process, humans play a crucial role in quality control, bias mitigation, and ethical oversight. They sift through the quality of both the training data and the model's output, provide nuanced judgment in ambiguous situations, and identify and rectify biases in the model's output, thereby boosting the fairness and efficiency of the AI system. Moreover, they draft guidelines and rules governing LLM usage, including what the model should and shouldn't do, and set up accountability mechanisms. This includes ensuring model compliance with specific ethical or legal guidelines and establishing systems for monitoring and managing potential issues.

Model Fine-tuning, Evaluation, and Edge Case Handling

Humans armed with domain knowledge steer the model's fine-tuning process. They make key decisions on model architecture, learning rate, loss function, and other hyperparameters, setting performance benchmarks based on specific application requirements. Concurrently, they handle edge cases that stray from the patterns the training data learned, guiding the model to handle these deviations correctly. Humans also manage the creation of ground truth labels, providing a benchmark set of human-labeled data vital for evaluating the model's performance. After the model is trained and fine-tuned, humans undertake the crucial task of testing and validating the model, assessing the quality, relevance, and appropriateness of the model's output. The trained model undergoes evaluation testing, where ML engineers feed it with a set of annotated test data. Depending on the result, they might further adjust the model’s parameter or proceed to finetune it for specific purposes. The latter involves supervised training, where the model is fed with annotated datasets.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

OpenAI: SFT and RLHF for InstructGPT
OpenAI: SFT and RLHF for InstructGPT

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) represents a fresh approach in training LLMs, where a model learns from human-provided feedback. Users interact with the model, rank the model's responses based on their quality, and this ranking serves as a reward signal to enhance the model's future outputs. This approach fosters continuous learning and improvement of the model based on real-world interactions and feedback, underlining the crucial value of human involvement in the training and evolution of LLMs.

How BasicAI Help in the Training of LLMs and Gen AI

At the vanguard of the digital world, BasicAI becomes the go-to solution for training data for bespoke LLMs. With a vast reservoir of 200TB of open-source datasets, we're akin to a library of 40 million books. Our rich collection includes over 100 multimodal datasets covering text, speech, image, video, and point cloud data. Also, we offer a comprehensive suite of Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) instruction sets with over a billion tokens, 3 million+ Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) records, and a distilled dataset curating insights from 5 million+ books.

At the heart of our LLM data solution is an expert team, fluent in major languages and diverse domains, to ensure your data is not just expansive, but pinpoint-accurate and relevant. They're your ace team to construct tailored LLMs using human-curated training data, and to fine-tune a foundation model that aligns seamlessly with your business vision. BasicAI is your comprehensive solution to tackle all data challenges in LLM training:

Data Cleaning and Extraction

We excel in identifying and mending issues like missing or inconsistent data, duplicate entries, and irrelevant information. Our expertise lies in extracting structured insights such as entities, attributes, relationships, and events from unstructured or semi-structured text. We transform text into a format that's a breeze to store, query, and analyze, revealing buried knowledge and patterns within the textual labyrinth.

Data Cleaning and Extraction for LLM Training

RLHF

Our approach involves crafting sets of prompts with expected outputs, ranking multiple responses generated by SFT models based on their relevance, and building a broader dataset capturing human preferences. We employ human feedback to assign scores to the outputs of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model, fostering continuous enhancement in model performance.

RLHF  for LLM Training

Conversation Construction and Evaluation

Our team designs high-quality, multi-turn dialogue datasets tailored to a diverse range of application scenarios and tasks. We use an array of evaluation methods and metrics to assess the continuous dialogue prowess of smart chatbots, ensuring they assist your users in gaining information or services, and resolving their issues effectively.

Conversations Construction and Evaluation for LLM Training

Model Fine-Tuning and Evaluation

Our goal is to ensure quality control in deployed applications and tailor models to align with specific business needs. We provide a consistent benchmark for performance comparison, assessing key metrics like precision, recall, or F1 score across different models. Our objective feedback facilitates continuous improvement and expedites the fine-tuning of existing LLM models for fast, effective, and human-like responses.

Model Fine-Tuning and Evaluation for LLM Training

Multimodal Data Annotation for the Next Generation Language Models

Relying solely on text limits the potential of LLMs. Humans outshine machines in their ability to reason, associate, and create, utilizing memories and thoughts forged from visual and auditory experiences since childhood. Not all knowledge can be encapsulated in text. Thus, training LLMs on text alone fall short of replicating human intelligence. That's why OpenAI has set its sights on strengthening multimodal abilities for their upcoming GPT-5.

In the realm of computer vision, supervised learning based on annotated data remains the optimal path for training machines to 'see'. Images and videos carry a wealth of information that surpasses text. Even prior to CNN, extracting information from a simple image featuring handwritten numbers was a challenge.

Our team can enrich your models with a diverse range of labeled data spanning text, images, videos, and audio. We fine-tune the process of data collection, cleaning, labeling, and verification to forge a path for more interactive and engaging user experiences.

Multimodal Data Annotation

The ascent of autonomously training LLMs isn't a rebuff to human expertise but rather an invitation to redefine our function. We are not mere bystanders in this narrative, but active participants shaping the trajectory of LLMs and Generative AI. Our involvement in their evolution is not just essential but instrumental in steering the future of this technology. We extend an invitation for you to join us on this exhilarating journey, whether by enriching this domain or utilizing our services to meet your data requirements.


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