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DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

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Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#31
post #3

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

Its not so bad. If they were radio astronomers they'd call it Very Big Neuronal Language Model. IBM would call it Watson Advanced AI. If they were a gamer accessory company they'd call it DeepTek Ultra Pro VDH-Max AI A320M. Chinchilla is nice and fluffy.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#32
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think of a parameter as a number you can tweak while training. This network has 70B such numbers.

And if every parameter is one byte, the minimum, it will take at least 70gb to save or share this model. So it's still way to big to package directly in a app.

From the paper, they are using bfloat16, so I guess two bytes. But distributing and "packaging into an app" are not at all of practical interest for these kinds of models. You (a consumer) would interact via some API service, with the model running on a hardware-accelerated compute cloud.

In any case, during training (where the model is run in possibly large batches), and even during inference, the size of the parameters is completely dwarfed by the intermediate tensor representations.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#33

Seems the link is down. Found a decent synopsis/discussion on lesswrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scalin... > On March 29th, DeepMind published a paper, "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", that shows that essentially everyone -- OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. -- has been training large language models with a deeply suboptimal use of compute. > Following the new scaling la…

70 billion parameters... Is each of those a 4-byte float?

So, is that 280 billion bytes of just parameters?

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#34
Is outperforming GPT-3 still a good reference? It seems there are many models outperforming GPT-3 in the superglue benchmark: https://super.gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/ GPT-3 is in position #21, with 71.8% score. The best model is at 91.2%. Note the human baseline in #6 with 89.8%

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#35
post #34

Is outperforming GPT-3 still a good reference? It seems there are many models outperforming GPT-3 in the superglue benchmark: https://super.gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/ GPT-3 is in position #21, with 71.8% score. The best model is at 91.2%. Note the human baseline in #6 with 89.8%

Aren’t most of the models at the top not suitable for text generation? That’s what makes gpt different from Bert

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#36

Seems the link is down. Found a decent synopsis/discussion on lesswrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scalin... > On March 29th, DeepMind published a paper, "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", that shows that essentially everyone -- OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. -- has been training large language models with a deeply suboptimal use of compute. > Following the new scaling la…

According to the LessWrong post, the smaller model trained on more data performs better on most of the tasks, but it’s worse on “college level math” questions. I wonder why that is. Is it because the extra capacity of the larger model was used to basically memorize theorems? Or is it because the extra “brain power” let it model the math better? Oddly, one of the tasks that the smaller most outperformed the larger mod…

[deleted]

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#37

This is exciting if only because as we discover more compute optimal models that out perform the behemoths that have been state of the art it opens up the ability for smaller independent groups to train and release their own versions, more fully democratizing AI. Looking forward to a group like Eluther or Hugging Face releasing a version of this.

>This is exciting if only because as we discover more compute optimal models that out perform the behemoths that have been state of the art it opens up the ability for smaller independent groups to train and release their own versions, more fully democratizing AI.

I think I support this in principle but it seems like the scaling curves keep going so it's easier to just make larger models with more data.

>Looking forward to a group like Eluther or Hugging Face releasing a version of this

Both of those groups have access to dozens if not hundreds of Cloud GPUs, I'd hardly call them small.

It would be impossible to replicate these models as say an independent researcher or even in an academic research group outside of maybe Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/etc. and I'd even doubt their ability to replicate models like this based purely on Cost alone.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#38
post #34

Is outperforming GPT-3 still a good reference? It seems there are many models outperforming GPT-3 in the superglue benchmark: https://super.gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/ GPT-3 is in position #21, with 71.8% score. The best model is at 91.2%. Note the human baseline in #6 with 89.8%

It's a good reference because people are familiar with GPT-3. The paper mostly compares Chinchilla to LaMDA, Jurassic, Gopher, MT-NLG, and GPT-3. In the broader tech industry and even to a certain extent within the AI field, GPT-3 is the only one that most people know by name.

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#39

Seems the link is down. Found a decent synopsis/discussion on lesswrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scalin... > On March 29th, DeepMind published a paper, "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", that shows that essentially everyone -- OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. -- has been training large language models with a deeply suboptimal use of compute. > Following the new scaling la…

According to the LessWrong post, the smaller model trained on more data performs better on most of the tasks, but it’s worse on “college level math” questions. I wonder why that is. Is it because the extra capacity of the larger model was used to basically memorize theorems? Or is it because the extra “brain power” let it model the math better? Oddly, one of the tasks that the smaller most outperformed the larger mod…

Probably right. Most people dump on these language models for this reason but it would be absurd for a HS student to have to re-derive the quadratic equation every time they worked on an Algebra problem so naturally you memorize it. Why should it be any different for a language model?

Re: DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla

#40

Seems the link is down. Found a decent synopsis/discussion on lesswrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scalin... > On March 29th, DeepMind published a paper, "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", that shows that essentially everyone -- OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. -- has been training large language models with a deeply suboptimal use of compute. > Following the new scaling la…

According to the LessWrong post, the smaller model trained on more data performs better on most of the tasks, but it’s worse on “college level math” questions. I wonder why that is. Is it because the extra capacity of the larger model was used to basically memorize theorems? Or is it because the extra “brain power” let it model the math better? Oddly, one of the tasks that the smaller most outperformed the larger mod…

Gwern responded to a similar question in the comments section.

(parent)

> the fact that data and compute need to scale proportionally seems… like a big point in favor of NNs as memorizers/interpolators.

(gwern)

> Surely it's the opposite? The more bang you get out of each parameter, the less it looks like 'just' (whatever that means) memorization/interpolation. When you needed to increase parameters a lot, disproportionately, to cope with some more data, that does not speak well of abstractions or understanding. (If I can train a 1t model to get the same loss as what I thought was going to take a 100t model, why would I think that that 100t model must be memorizing/interpolating less?) Let's take your claim to its logical extreme: suppose we discovered tomorrow a scaling law that made parameters near-constant (log, let's say); would that not suggest that those parameters are super useful and it's doing an amazing job of learning the underlying algorithm and is not memorizing/interpolating?

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