resoluteteeth
6 hours ago
It's pointless to write a whole article about how model collapse is actually happening and isn't just a theoretical concern with no evidence that model collapse is actually happening.
janalsncm
3 hours ago
It isn’t pointless.
The author cited research that demonstrates that model collapse can happen on a small scale.
The author also cited sources that a larger and larger portion of the web will be written by language models.
There are already studies showing that LLM generated text is less diverse than human generated text:
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-llms-creativity-ai-respo...
https://arxiv.org/html/2501.19361
The studies don’t show that the lack of creativity in LLMs is caused by model collapse or that the problem is getting worse.
But 1) we know they do this and 2) we know that training on synthetic data can cause model collapse.
PeterisP
2 hours ago
The key missing step which breaks the loop is that while indeed a larger and larger portion of the web is written by language models, that data isn't being used to train new models - at the beginning of LLMs people did indeed want to use "all the web" to train models, but that's not being done now anymore, you either take only old pre-LLM data, or you pay for new 'clean' data, or take extensive filtering steps to avoid accidentally ingesting synthetic data.
The main phrase of the title "model collapse is happening" is untrue and not substantiated in the article - all the true statements in the article are about the hypothetical problem, warning of the bad consequences that would likely happen if makers of major models did something they aren't doing, but they aren't doing that because that is a known issue that they're avoiding. It's like writing an article "Foot shooting epidemic is happening" with a long, solid (and true!) proof that if you'll shoot yourself in the foot, it will indeed cause serious injury...
locknitpicker
5 hours ago
> It's pointless to write a whole article about how model collapse is actually happening and isn't just a theoretical concern with no evidence that model collapse is actually happening.
Except perhaps the link to article on the peer-reviewed paper that describes the problem in detail.
https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/news/2356-full.html
> Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published work on this back in 2023, showing how iterative training on synthetic data leads to progressive degradation.
Legend2440
4 hours ago
This is a toy example of how it could happen, in an artificial setting where you train entirely on generated outputs many times in a row.
It does not say that it is happening in production LLMs. It is a theoretical concern right now.