Olmo 3: Charting a path through the model flow to lead open-source AI

I tried the playground at https://playground.allenai.org/ and clicked the "Show OlmoTrace" button.

Above the response it says

> Documents from the training data that have exact text matches with the model response. Powered by infini-gram

so, if I understand correctly, it searches the training data for matches in the LLM output. This is not traceability in my opinion. This is an attempt at guessing.

Checking individual sources I got texts completely unrelated with the question/answer, but that happen to share an N-gram [1] (I saw sequences up to 6 words) with the LLM answer.

I think they're being dishonest in their presentation of what Olmo can and can't do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram

Olmo researcher here. The point of OlmoTrace is not no attribute the entire response to one document in the training data—that’s not how language models “acquire” knowledge, and finding a single or few documents as support for an answer is impossible.

The point of OlmoTrace is to show that fragments of model response are influenced by its training data. sometimes is how specific adjectives are used together in way that seem unnatural to us, but are combination of training data (ask for a movie review!)

A favorite example of mine is asking to tell a joke or ask for a random number, because strangely all LLMs return the same joke or number. Well with OlmoTrace, you can see which docs in the training data contain the super common response!

hope this helps