when the core unlock was achieving a kind of general-purpose computer neural net via simple scalable objectives that have strong training signal (many bits of contraints per training example). Like language modeling, and not like reinforcement learning.
So that was interesting 😀
AI
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General-Purpose Neural Networks Through Simple Scalable Objectives
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Scaling Language Models: Neural Networks as General-Purpose Text Computers
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TLDR: LMs have been around forever. Not obvious finding: turns out that if you scale up the training set and use a powerful enough neural net (Transformer), the network becomes a kind of general-purpose computer over text.
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A Decade of AI Progress: Language Models and Neural Networks
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I wrote this thread because I spent the last ~decade, obsessing over directions that would make fastest progress in AI, and was very interested in language models (e.g. my semi-famous 2015 post "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks" https://
karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn
-effectiveness/
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Mispredicting scaling potential: Early distraction with reinforcement learning
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But I still mispredicted in how much fertile ground there was in scaling up the paradigm. Like many others in AI I got distracted by Reinforcement Learning too soon, a kind of putting the cart before the horse, …
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Transformer Training Objective Difficulty Forces Weight Space Optimization
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The second critical ingredient is that while a Transformer seems ~able to act as a general-purpose computer in principle, the training objective has to be hard enough to actually force the optimization to discover and converge onto it in the "weights space" of the network.
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Language Modeling as Universal Learning Objective Through Text Compression
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Turns out language modeling (i.e. ~next word prediction; equivalent to compression) of internet text is this excellent objective – v simple to define and collect data for at scale. It forces the neural net to learn a lot about the world, "multi-tasking" across many domains.
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GPT as a General-Purpose Computer Reconfigurable via Natural Language Programs
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If previous neural nets are special-purpose computers designed for a specific task, GPT is a general-purpose computer, reconfigurable at run-time to run natural language programs. Programs are given in prompts (a kind of inception). GPT runs the program by completing the document
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Transformer: The Critical Unlock Technology for General-Purpose AI
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So the first critical "unlock technology" is the Transformer, a neural net architecture powerful enough to become a general-purpose computer. I've written more about this here: 1) https://
x.com/karpathy/statu
s/1582807367988654081
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Transformers’ In-Context Learning: Emergent Ability at Scale
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The non-obvious crux of the shift is an empirical finding, emergent only at scale, and well-articulated in the GPT-3 paper (
https://
arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165). Basically, Transformers demonstrate the ability of "in-context" learning. At run-time, in the activations. No weight updates. -
Neural Language Models: 20 Years of Autoregressive Architecture Evolution
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E.g. ~20 years ago Bengio et al 2003 (pdf: https://
jmlr.org/papers/volume3
/bengio03a/bengio03a.pdf
…) trained a neural language model. The state of the art GPT+friends of today are the exact same (autoregressive) model, except the neural net architecture is upgraded from an MLP to a Transformer.