Actually, another issue is that unsupervised translation isn't "that hard" relative to supervised translation--I think that you can get pretty far with simple heuristics, such that I'd guess making the model 10x bigger matters more than making the objective more aligned with getting the answer right (and that this will be true for at least a couple more 10x-ing of model size, although at some point the objective will matter more).
This might not matter as much if you're actually outputting explanations and not just translating from one language to another. Although it is probably true that for tasks that are far away from the ceiling, "naive objective + 10x larger model" will outperform "correct objective".
Thanks Paul, I generally like this idea.
Aside from the potential concerns you bring up, here is the most likely way I could see this experiment failing to be informative: rather than having checks and question marks in your tables above, really the model's ability to solve each task is a question of degree--each table entry will be a real number between 0 and 1. For, say, tone, GPT-3 probably doesn't have a perfect model of tone, and would get <100% performance on a sentiment classification task, especially if done few-shot.
The issue, then, is that the "fine-tuning for correctness" and "fine-tuning for coherence" processes are not really equivalent--fine-tuning for correctness is in fact giving GPT-3 additional information about tone, which improves its capabilities. In addition, GPT-3 might not "know" exactly what humans mean by the word tone, and so fine-tuning for correctness also helps GPT-3 to better understand the question.
Given these considerations, my modal expectation is that fine-tuning for correctness will provide moderately better results than just doing coherence, but it won't be clear how to interpret the difference--maybe in both cases GPT-3 provides incoherent outputs 10% of the time, and then additionally coherent but wrong outputs 10% of the time when fine-tuned for correctness, but 17% of the time when fine-tuned only for coherence. What would you conclude from a result like that? I would still have found the experiment interesting, but I'm not sure I would be able to draw a firm conclusion.
So perhaps my main feedback would be to think about how likely you think such an outcome is, how much you mind that, and if there are alternative tasks that avoid this issue without being significantly more complicated.
This doesn't seem so relevant to capybaralet's case, given that he was choosing whether to accept an academic offer that was already extended to him.
Thanks, sounds good to me!