> if it was smart enough

and i think this is exactly the crux;

the really big models need really big datasets

and current gen LLMs get a lot of training data beyond "all books + all of the internet"

the objection is then that producing this additional data would already confound it with pre "virtual cutoff date" knowledge (since the training data probably implies mathematical and SWE concepts that were developed post "virtual cutoff date")

It's because LLMs are entropy generators. That's not a bad thing for what people are doing.

But to prevent model collapse you need a way to pump down the entropy. Much like in thermo, it's an expensive and slow process.

If it is smart enough to generate data it can consume to train itself better, it is already smart enough to not need to do that.

They are already trained on generated data I believe