I get that this is technically interesting, for certain, but the sheer amount of energy and associated global warming risk needed to do something with >=99% accuracy that we've been able to do easily for decades with a guaranteed 100% accuracy seems to me to be wasteful to the extreme.
Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
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Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#22I get that this is technically interesting, for certain, but the sheer amount of energy and associated global warming risk needed to do something with >=99% accuracy that we've been able to do easily for decades with a guaranteed 100% accuracy seems to me to be wasteful to the extreme.
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#23Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#24So, hand-coded weights can do it with 36 params and 311 for trained weights - did anyone try the former architecture, but starting with random weights and learning?
"So that the room will be empty."
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#25I made a blogpost on my submission (currently the top handwritten one at 36 parameters) https://alexlitzenberger.com/blog/building_a_minimal_transfo...
Does this result suggest that if we had N clever humans manually building an LLM, they might come up with something as smart as a frontier model, but potentially 45 times smaller? (1644 / 36 ~= 45, N = very large, time not specified)
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#26I made a blogpost on my submission (currently the top handwritten one at 36 parameters) https://alexlitzenberger.com/blog/building_a_minimal_transfo...
I ask this question as someone who can't do much more than confirm that your blog post is written in English by someone who knows math. Does this result suggest that if we had N clever humans manually building an LLM, they might come up with something as smart as a frontier model, but potentially 45 times smaller? (1644 / 36 ~= 45, N = very large, time not specified)
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ask this question as someone who can't do much more than confirm that your blog post is written in English by someone who knows math. Does this result suggest that if we had N clever humans manually building an LLM, they might come up with something as smart as a frontier model, but potentially 45 times smaller? (1644 / 36 ~= 45, N = very large, time not specified)
I imagine getting things to be polysemantic in a way that does not interfere would lead to sublinear scaling. Also there are smaller ones that were trained so would still be more like 311/36 ~= 8.6.
(I see the Trained Weights results now, thanks.)
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#28I get that this is technically interesting, for certain, but the sheer amount of energy and associated global warming risk needed to do something with >=99% accuracy that we've been able to do easily for decades with a guaranteed 100% accuracy seems to me to be wasteful to the extreme.
Does this boil down to a condemnation of all scientific endeavours if they use resources?
Would it change things if the people who did it enjoyed themselves? Would they have spent more energy playing a first person shooter to get the same degree of enjoyment?
How do you make the calculation of the worth of a human endeavour? Perhaps the greater question is why are you making a calculation of the worth of a human endeavour.
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
From context then, I infer that a transformer is not comprised of matrix multiplications, because it would simply be one that adds two 10-digit numbers.
A transformer tokenizes input, does a bunch of matmul and relu set up in a certain way. It doesn't get to see the raw number (just like you don't when you look at 1+1 you need visual cortex etc. first.)
I guess the analogy there is that a 74ls283 never really has a number either and just manipulates a series of logic levels.
Re: Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
From context then, I infer that a transformer is not comprised of matrix multiplications, because it would simply be one that adds two 10-digit numbers.
A transformer tokenizes input, does a bunch of matmul and relu set up in a certain way. It doesn't get to see the raw number (just like you don't when you look at 1+1 you need visual cortex etc. first.)