There is no reason to believe an LLM answers a question with the most common answer on the internet.
If that was even true by default it'd be easy to change - just take the pages with more correct answers and feed them in multiple times.
> Whatever shows up most commonly in the training data is is what an LLM will output. It's more complicated than that of course, but that's the basic idea.
The most common thing in the training data is the letter 'e'. If you're going to explain how an LLM works it needs to explain why it's able to form sentences at all.
In particular answering questions is a behavior which only appears after posttraining, and the posttraining objective has absolutely nothing to do with what's "most common" in the pretraining data.
> But that would mean someone would have to curate the entire internet, looking for anything that's 'incorrect' (or intended as humor) and making sure it doesn't end up in the training data
Show the LLM the source URL during pretraining so it can cluster them together.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01956
The cheap version of this technique is to find trustworthy text (Wikipedia, answers you paid people to write, high upvoted Reddit comments) and train on it more than once. The rest falls out through emergent magic (reliable sources have different writing styles than unreliable ones and RL points it to the part of latent space with the reliable sources, or something.)
Besides that, if it encounters 95%/5% right/wrong answers to some question during training, that will have a different effect than 100%/0%. It does know when something is debated.
Whatever shows up most commonly in the training data is is what an LLM will output. It's more complicated than that of course, but that's the basic idea.
And I think you missed the point. If you knew which were 'correct' and which were 'incorrect' then you could avoid the problem altogether. But that would mean someone would have to curate the entire internet, looking for anything that's 'incorrect' (or intended as humor) and making sure it doesn't end up in the training data Or LLM-generated content, to avoid cascading failures.
That's an unbelievable amount of work. It's essentially impossible, no matter how much money you throw at it. There's so much content being made every day you couldn't even keep up with what's being added let alone what's already there.