AI Incentive

I gave a talk at Seoul National University. I titled the talk “Large Language Models (in 2023)”. This was an ambitious attempt to summarize our exploding field. Trying to summarize the field forced me to think about what really matters in the field. While scaling undeniably stands out, its far-reaching implications are more nuanced. I share my thoughts on scaling from three angles: 1:02 1) Change in perspective is necessary because some abilities only emerge at a certain scale. Even if some abilities don’t work with the current generation LLMs, we should not claim that it doesn’t work. Rather, we should think it doesn’t work yet. Once larger models are available many conclusions change. This also means that some conclusions from the past are invalidated and we need to constantly unlearn intuitions built on top of such ideas. 7:12 2) From first-principles, scaling up the Transformer amounts to efficiently doing matrix multiplications with many, many machines. I see many researchers in the field of LLM who are not familiar with how scaling is actually done. This section is targeted for technical audiences who want to understand what it means to train large models. 27:52 3) I talk about what we should think about for further scaling (think 10000x GPT-4 scale). To me scaling isn’t just doing the same thing with more machines. It entails finding the inductive bias that is the bottleneck in further scaling. I believe that the maximum likelihood objective function is the bottleneck in achieving the scale of 10000x GPT-4 level. Learning the objective function with an expressive neural net is the next paradigm that is a lot more scalable. With the compute cost going down exponentially, scalable methods eventually win. Don’t compete with that. In all of these sections, I strive to describe everything from first-principles. In an extremely fast moving field like LLM, no one can keep up. I believe that understanding the core ideas by deriving from first-principles is the only scalable approach. Disclaimer: I give my personal opinions and the talk material doesn't reflect my employer's opinion in any way.