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AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

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Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it can do simple yes/no questions but can it write dad jokes like GPT-3?

For me another question is crucial: is it open (i.e. is there an open source reference implementation) or closed like the so-called "OpenAI" products/services?

You can find the code for the paper here: https://github.com/timoschick/pet

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#12
What a weird article.

Semi-supervised training is always interesting, but leading with fact that it outperforms GPT-3 on superGLUE in the few shot setting where GPT-3 isn't training/fine-tuning but PET is.

To make it clear: they finetune PET using synthetic data and then compare the results of this to GPT-3 where GPT-3 is initalized to prepare for querying.

I would like to see how much overlap the synthetic data has with the queries used.

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#13

GPT3's strength is on language generation, so using *GLUE for evaluating it (where encoder type models are just better) and claiming to have 99.9% less parameters is sensationalism.

This isn't strictly true. This is comparing to "GPT3 as a few-shot learner"[1] as opposed to the fine tuned models that everyone else use.

Few-shot GPT3 outperforms a BERT-based baseline.

[1] https://github.com/openai/gpt-3

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#15

I'm not surprised, a space with 175B parameters will be very sparse.

It's not obvious to me that this is the case. Chris Olah and others talk about "superposition" as a mechanism to explain "polysemantic" neurons that arise in image classifiers. To me, that suggests (using very vague, hand-wavy terms) that the optimization process is attempting to pack in as many concepts as possible into the finite parameter space. Certainly the scaling of GPT-3 suggests that these larger models are not necessarily any sparser than smaller ones.

[1]: https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/zoom-in/

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#16
We should not be surprised to see new language models achieving GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters. The purpose (I assume, as an outsider) of the GPT-* project is to try to find the upper bound of how good a language model can be, without caring too much about efficiency. GPT-3 essentially scaled up the known good architecture of GPT-2.

If you have a really big compute cluster, it makes sense to do experiments like this. It would be foolish to constantly try new methods without occasionally checking to see how far you can push current methods.

A similar thing happened with VGGnet in image classification. It achieved SoTA with a huge amount of parameters, using the standard techniques of the time, but increasing the network depth. Later, people discovered a lot of tricks to get similar accuracy with fewer parameters.

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#18
post #13

GPT3's strength is on language generation, so using *GLUE for evaluating it (where encoder type models are just better) and claiming to have 99.9% less parameters is sensationalism.

This isn't strictly true. This is comparing to "GPT3 as a few-shot learner"[1] as opposed to the fine tuned models that everyone else use. Few-shot GPT3 outperforms a BERT-based baseline. [1] https://github.com/openai/gpt-3

Yeah, but they actually do fine-tune their model and compare it to in-batch GPT3 "learning". I called them out on it on Reddit and they claim that they use the same amount of data. I.e. GPT use X examples in the sample and they use the same amount of X samples to fine-tune. However, I am still not convinced that it is a fair comparison.

Re: AI training method exceeds GPT-3 performance with fewer parameters

#20
Am I the only one who finds it strange that a preprint gets that kind of news coverage and the authors of the preprint are the only ones who are interviewed? Even if it wasn't a preprint, I suppose it's good practice to ask independent experts for a second and third opinion. (Edit: a problem I see with such news coverage is that it really encourages researchers to rush their work out and make headline-grabbing claims even before they have any idea of what the scientific community thinks about the work.)
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