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DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

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Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably a space-time trade off that needs to be explored in this space. It might be possible to preload the some of the most likely tokens to be selected next into the cache and/or RAM. These are glorified auto-complete algorithms that are poorly understood, as DeepMind's optimizations appear to show. For the English language, it is probable that there are only so many possible grammatically correct selecti…

Glorified autocomplete? Autocomplete can guess the next word .. sometimes, GPT-3 goes hundreds of words ahead. On generic topics it can be hard to distinguish from human text. And it can't cache tokens because all tokens are evaluated in the context of all the other tokens, so they don't have the same representations when they reoccur at different positions.

They're evaluated in the context of the last 2^n many tokens, for many models it is 1024, 2048, or 4096 tokens as a scanning window. The tokens (words and sometimes punctuation) are represented by integer values, so the last 2^n many tokens would certainly qualify for storage in a cache. Then next token selection only has so many possible assignable selections in any given language model because of grammatical limitations. This is only one such optimization, there could also be optimizations around the likelihood of certain words to be used given the presence of certain previous tokens, and so on.

But, yes, tokens are chosen one word as a time based on the previous content, similar to earlier auto-completion algorithms.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#14
post #3

I have to ask, why call it that? I had a chuckle once I saw the name.

Large language models have a (recent) history of silly names. BERT, BART, ELMO, RoBERTa, BIGBIRD, PaLM, Megatron etc. Might as well go full nonsense.

True. I will add that it is customary to justify it by demonstrating it is some sort of acronym or contraction.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#18
post #3

I have to ask, why call it that? I had a chuckle once I saw the name.

Large language models have a (recent) history of silly names. BERT, BART, ELMO, RoBERTa, BIGBIRD, PaLM, Megatron etc. Might as well go full nonsense.

A touch of irony that cutting edge research on language can’t produce better names.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large language models have a (recent) history of silly names. BERT, BART, ELMO, RoBERTa, BIGBIRD, PaLM, Megatron etc. Might as well go full nonsense.

True. I will add that it is customary to justify it by demonstrating it is some sort of acronym or contraction.

It's a recursive, selective acronym

               C
              CH
             CHI
            CHIN
           CHINC
          CHINCH
         CHINCHI
        CHINCHIL
       CHINCHILL
  ==> CHINCHILLA
      HINCHILLA
      INCHILLA
      NCHILLA
      CHILLA
      HILLA
      ILLA
      LLA
      LA
      A
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