LLM's Data

We obsess over model architecture and FLOPS, but the most important component of any new language model is the one we talk about the least: the dataset's "taste."

Data curation is the least glamorous but most leveraged work in AI. It's not janitorial work; it's a design discipline. The decisions about which data to filter, which sources to up-weight, and which "bad vibes" to surgically remove are what give a model its character. It's the difference between an AI that feels like a soulless encyclopedia and one that feels like a witty, helpful collaborator.

The entire personality of a model is a ghostwritten artifact of its data curators. They are the unsung product designers of this generation. Forget the model card; I want to see a "data card" that tells me about the philosophy of the people who shaped what the model knows.