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Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

#31
post #22

The MAMBA [1] model gained some traction as a potential successor. It's basically an RNN without the non linearity applied across hidden states, which makes it logarithmic time (instead of linear time) inference with a parallelizable scan [2]. It promises much faster inference with much lower compute costs, and I think up to 7B params, performs on par with transformers. I've yet to see a 40B+ model trained. The resea…

Oh that would be awesome for that to work. Thanks for sharing

Re: Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

#32

I hate that popular domains take ownership of highly generic words. Many years ago, I struggled for a while to understand that when people say "frontend" they often mean a website frontend, even without any further context.

The worst offender is "feature". In my domain (ML and geo) we have three definitions. Feature could be referring to some addition to the user-facing product, a raster input to machine learning, or a vector entity in GeoJSON. Context is the only tool we have to make the distinction, it gets really confusing when you're working on features that involve querying the features with features.

You can say the same thing about “model” even in ML. Depending on the context it can be quite confusing:

1) an architecture described in a paper

2) the trained weights of a specific instantiation of architecture

3) a chunk of code/neural net that accomplishes a task, agnostic to the above definitions

Re: Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

#33

Right now as long as the rocket's heading straight up, everyone's on board with MLPs (Multilayer Perceptrons/Transformers)! Why not stay on the same rocket for now!? We're almost at AGI already!

Why are you conflating MLPs in general with specifically transformers?

Re: Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_a...

Yeah, it's literally the most important practical development in AI/ML of the decade. This is like reading an article (or headline, more like) on HN and saying "please define git".

>This is like ... saying "please define git"

It's really not. "Git" has a single extremely strong definition for tech people, and a single regional slang definition. "Transformer" has multiple strong definitions for tech people, and multiple strong definitions colloquially.

Not that we can't infer the OP's meaning - just that it's nowhere near as unambiguous as "git".

Re: Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?

#39
post #21

You have stuff like: https://www.literal-labs.ai/tsetlin-machines/ and https://tsetlinmachine.org/ European initiatives..

52x less energy is crazy. Seems like it's in the veeery early stages, though, a quick search basically only yields the original paper and articles about it. This comment from the creator really shines light on the novel approach, though, which I find oddly antagonistic towards Big Tech: "Where the Tsetlin machine currently excels is energy-constrained edge machine learning, where you can get up to 10000x less energy…

It's true that Tsetlin Machines are currently a fringe area of ML research, especially compared to the focus on deep learning advancements coming out of SF and China. It's early days, but the energy efficiency potential is insane. I believe further investment could yield significant results. Having been supervised by the creator, I'm admittedly biased, but the underlying foundation in Tsetlin's learning automata gives it a solid theoretical grounding. Dedicated funding is definitely needed to explore its full potential.
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