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PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

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Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#101
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why don't you just use chatGPT? from what i know it's running GPT3.5 and it's not that different (at least in terms of code quality)

In my experiments bard is weaker than 3.5, but if it wasn't, than I would prefer the fresh data of bard.

What is its training data cutoff date?

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#102
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimazing for training could help distillation also.

I agree distillation is the wild card. The question is whether distillation works for LLM. I am not aware of any public report of successful distillation of LLM (I searched quite hard for this; if you know of any and can tell me I would be very grateful), and I interpreted it to mean that it doesn't work yet and negative results are not published due to publication bias.

Off the top of my head there's DistilBERT from awhile back. I also recall distilled GPT-2 models from before the GPT-3 times.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#103
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree distillation is the wild card. The question is whether distillation works for LLM. I am not aware of any public report of successful distillation of LLM (I searched quite hard for this; if you know of any and can tell me I would be very grateful), and I interpreted it to mean that it doesn't work yet and negative results are not published due to publication bias.

This was published here in HN last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35810663 Don't know if there any public technical reports by any of the big AI companies about this, as its pretty new.

No, distilling step-by-step https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02301 distills LLM to task specific model. That works, and I know of multiple successes. But it doesn't relate to choice of optimizing training FLOP vs training and inference FLOP, since the resulting distilled model is not LLM.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#104
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why don't you just use chatGPT? from what i know it's running GPT3.5 and it's not that different (at least in terms of code quality)

In my experiments bard is weaker than 3.5, but if it wasn't, than I would prefer the fresh data of bard.

One area where I noticed Bard was clearly behind (at least without crafting a better prompt) is getting from half-working program to a running program then sometime even to a correct program (I was using Python).

With GPT 3.5 and 4, I was able to just paste in the error and it'd do the rest. Bard however tried to tell me what the error could be, and wouldn't do well even when asked to fix the code.

Even GPT 4 though, when asked to go from specs to tests + code, would get stuck in a loop of making one test pass only to make the other pass and vice versa. The program I tried to let it write was a query validator that can test whether a string matches a pattern that uses AND, OR and NOT.

It did well on parsing my specs into tests, but from there on it didn't go very well.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#105
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimazing for training could help distillation also.

I agree distillation is the wild card. The question is whether distillation works for LLM. I am not aware of any public report of successful distillation of LLM (I searched quite hard for this; if you know of any and can tell me I would be very grateful), and I interpreted it to mean that it doesn't work yet and negative results are not published due to publication bias.

The name 3.5-turbo sounds to me like it implies distillation. The release notes at the time also hinted at it IIRC.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my hand at estimating their parameter count from extrapolating their LAMBADA figures, assuming they all trained on Chinchilla law: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fvy4xNkXgAEDF_D?format=jpg&name=... If the extrapolation is not too flawed, it looks like PaLM 2-S might be about 120B, PaLM 2-M 180B, PaLM 2-L 280B. Still, I would expect GPT-4 trained for way longer than Chinchilla, so it could be smaller than even Pa…

They said the smallest PaLM 2 can run locally on a Pixel Smartphone. There's no way it's 120B parameters. It's probably not even 12B.

I am talking about the 3 larger models PaLM 2-S, PaLM 2-M, and PaLM 2-L described in the technical report.

At I/O, I think they were referencing the scaling law experiments: there are four of them, just like the number of PaLM 2 codenames they cited at I/O (Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn). The largest of those smaller-scale models is 14.7B, which is too big for a phone too. The smallest is 1B, which can fit in 512MB of RAM with GPTQ4-style quantization.

Either that, or Gecko is the smaller scaling experiment, and Otter is PaLM 2-S.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#107
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree distillation is the wild card. The question is whether distillation works for LLM. I am not aware of any public report of successful distillation of LLM (I searched quite hard for this; if you know of any and can tell me I would be very grateful), and I interpreted it to mean that it doesn't work yet and negative results are not published due to publication bias.

Off the top of my head there's DistilBERT from awhile back. I also recall distilled GPT-2 models from before the GPT-3 times.

Yes, DistilBERT https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108 is in fact the closest case I know of. But it is too small (distilling from 110M to 66M) and both BERT and DistilBERT is intended to be used (and benchmarked) with separate fine tuning for specific tasks, so they are not general.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#109
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree distillation is the wild card. The question is whether distillation works for LLM. I am not aware of any public report of successful distillation of LLM (I searched quite hard for this; if you know of any and can tell me I would be very grateful), and I interpreted it to mean that it doesn't work yet and negative results are not published due to publication bias.

The name 3.5-turbo sounds to me like it implies distillation. The release notes at the time also hinted at it IIRC.

Well, that's why I said public. Personally, I don't think release notes https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-... hinted at any such thing, and I think quantization is more likely than distillation.

Re: PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]

#110
The thing is, once a company creates a proto AGI where the path to a functional AGI is entirely predictable with more compute, they'll keep it a secret. Who would share the fact that the greatest achievement in human history is possible when having it before anyone else gives you a huge competitive advantage?
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