Lambert: Reinforcement Learning Does Far Less for Alignment Than People Think
Nathan Lambert · The Origin and Future of RLHF: the secret ingredient for ChatGPT - with Nathan Lambert · Jan 11, 2024 · at 58:36
AI researcher Dr. Nathan Lambert contextualizes the true technical contribution of reinforcement learning algorithms within modern language model post-training pipelines.
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“It's like, now you're getting to the point where you don't even really need this to get a good model, so that's why it's like, okay, the RL is such a small part of the actual, like, doing RLHF. Like, RLHF is a metaphor for, like, all language model adaptation, and RL is one tool used at one point in the time. So that's kind of where I wrap up like the core overview in my mind to say like RL doesn't really do as much as people think, but you could put up flashy equations and do all sorts of stuff if you want to.”
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