Remember in Jurassic Park where the dinosaur DNA was extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber? That wasn't necessarily the best DNA, just the easiest to extract. The best writing might be love letters or high school term papers or PRDs meant for internal distribution, and these never get put online to be fed into LLM training sets. Instead we have 20 years of StackOverflow and Reddit posts saying "it's not a bug, it's a feature" or "Die Hard isn't an action flick, it's a Christmas movie" with 10k upvotes and LLMs learned that's how you get the biggest reaction with the least amount of words. It's not a bug, it's a...you get the point
It's a valuable pattern because a lot of communication is about drawing distinctions and making delineations. Saying what a thing isn't (despite being close to it) gives you a more clear understanding of what it is.
I wouldn't put too much emphasis on pre-training data, there are so many steps afterwards in modern LLM development that completely change the output. Generally, if you're looking at LLM output in 2026 and thinking something along the lines of "this must be what humans were doing with their language in the training data", you need to pause and reconsider, because modern LLMs are much more than machines which repeat what was in the training data.
Primarily training data. A lot of times it’s a hedge to show two things and let the user decide which fits their framing best
Most of the large models collected data from marketing speak, opinion posts, etc (the whole internet basically). I feel like it’s a common sales pitch I’ve heard many times over - now it’s just compounded with everyone having access to the same pattern generator clanker
Remember in Jurassic Park where the dinosaur DNA was extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber? That wasn't necessarily the best DNA, just the easiest to extract. The best writing might be love letters or high school term papers or PRDs meant for internal distribution, and these never get put online to be fed into LLM training sets. Instead we have 20 years of StackOverflow and Reddit posts saying "it's not a bug, it's a feature" or "Die Hard isn't an action flick, it's a Christmas movie" with 10k upvotes and LLMs learned that's how you get the biggest reaction with the least amount of words. It's not a bug, it's a...you get the point
Got it. Sigh... I wonder how these arguably extra tokens affect GPU utilization. So much waste!
It's a valuable pattern because a lot of communication is about drawing distinctions and making delineations. Saying what a thing isn't (despite being close to it) gives you a more clear understanding of what it is.
I wouldn't put too much emphasis on pre-training data, there are so many steps afterwards in modern LLM development that completely change the output. Generally, if you're looking at LLM output in 2026 and thinking something along the lines of "this must be what humans were doing with their language in the training data", you need to pause and reconsider, because modern LLMs are much more than machines which repeat what was in the training data.
Primarily training data. A lot of times it’s a hedge to show two things and let the user decide which fits their framing best
Most of the large models collected data from marketing speak, opinion posts, etc (the whole internet basically). I feel like it’s a common sales pitch I’ve heard many times over - now it’s just compounded with everyone having access to the same pattern generator clanker