Is RLHF the artificial selection of LLMs? A Darwinian analogy for model training
Short-Search-4892 · reddit · 2026-09-24
The author proposes a discussion: Darwin opened Origin of Species with artificial selection—breeders picking pigeons generation after generation to produce dramatic change fast—then argued nature does the same blindly over deep time.
- Mapped to LLMs: pretraining generates variation, RLHF/fine-tuning applies selection pressure, generations take hours instead of millennia; the 'organism' is a weight matrix and the breeder is us.
- The author asks whether the analogy holds or breaks down.
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