Why does this matter at all?
How can you confirm the legitimacy of the 18k claim? Both 18k and 9k look just as shiny and golden to your untrained eye. You need a tool and the expertise to be able to tell, so you bring your jeweler friend along to vouch for it. No jeweler friend? Maybe the salesperson can convince you by showing you a certificate of authenticity from a source you recognize.
Now replace the gold with a LLM.
Anything without an iron-clad chain of provenance should be assumed to be stolen or forged.
Because the end product is unprovably authentic in all cases, unless a forger made a detectable error.
In plain english the final model you load and all the components used to generate that model can be cryptographically verified back to whomever trained it and if any part of that chain can't be verified alarm bells go off, things fail, etc.
Someone please correct me if my understanding is off.
Edit: typo
Think of sausage(ML model), made up of constituent parts(weights, datasets, etc) put through various processes(training, tuning), end of the day, all you the consumer cares about is the product won't kill you at a bare minimum(it isn't giving you dodgy outputs). In the US there is the USDA(TPM) which quite literally stations someone(this software, assuming I am grokking it right) from the ranch to the sausage factory(parts and processes) at every step of the way to watch(hash) for any hijinks(someone poisons the well), or just genuine human error(gets trained due to a bug on old weights) in the stages and stops to correct the error and find the cause and allows you traceability.
The consumer enjoys the benefit of the process because they simply have to trust the USDA, the USDA can verify by having someone trusted checking at each stage of the process.
Ironically that system exists in the US because meatpacking plants did all manner of dodgy things like add adulterants so the US congress forced them to be inspected.
How can you confirm the legitimacy of what you have been taught?
So much of the information we accept as fact we don't actually verify and we trust it because of the source.
An LLM being used for sentencing in criminal cases could go sideways quickly. An LLM used to generate video subtitles if the subtitles aren't provided by someone else would have more limited negative impacts.
Differences in interpretations of historical and cultural events are far more nuanced.
We’ll likely end up in a place with many trusted sources of attestation, each with their own bias toward particular notions of the truth.
Like schools and media outlets, there will be many LLMs to choose from that will tell you, confidently and authoritatively, what you want to hear.