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0 pointsfamouswaffles2y ago0 comments

>And it is not true that computing power will continue to reduce; Moore's Law has been dead for some time now, and if incremental growth in LLMs require exponential growth in computing power the marginal difference won't matter.

This is a lot of unfounded assumptions.

You don't need Moore's Law. GPU's are not really made with ML training in mind. You don't need exponential growth for anything. The money Open ai spent on GPT-4 a year ago could train a model twice as large today. and that amount is a drop in the bucket for the R&D of large corporations. Microsoft gave open ai 10B. amazon gave anthropic 4B

>So compute will not fall at the rate you would need it to for LLMs to actually compete in any meaningful way with human software engineers.

I don't think the compute reuired is anywhere near as much as you think it is.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12499

>We are not guaranteed to continue to progress in anything just because we have in the past.

Nothing is guaranteed. But the scaling plots show no indication of a slow down so it's up to you to provide a concrete reason this object in motion is going to stop immediately and conveniently right now. If all you have is "well it just can't keep getting better right" then visit the 2 and 3 threads to see how meaningless such unfounded assertions are.

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WendyTheWillow2y ago

I think you fundamentally don't understand the nature of exponential growth, and the power of diminishing returns. Even if you double the GPU capacity over the next year, you won't even remotely begin to come close enough to producing a step-level growth of capability such as what we experienced between 2 to 3, or even 3 to 4. The LLM concept can only take you so far, and we're approaching the limits of what an LLM is capable of. You generally can't just push an innovation infinitely, it will have a drop-off point somewhere.

the "Large" part of LLMs is probably done. We've gotten as far as we can with those style of models, and the next innovation will be in smaller, more targeted models.

> As costs have skyrocketed while benefits have leveled off, the economics of scale have turned against ever-larger models. Progress will instead come from improving model architectures, enhancing data efficiency, and advancing algorithmic techniques beyond copy-paste scale. The era of unlimited data, computing and model size that remade AI over the past decade is finally drawing to a close. [0]

> Altman, who was interviewed over Zoom at the Imagination in Action event at MIT yesterday, believes we are approaching the limits of LLM size for size’s sake. “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s gonna be these giant models, and we’ll make them better in other ways,” Altman said. [1]

[0] https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-chief-says-age-of-giant-ai...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/14/sam-altman-size-of-llms-wo...

famouswafflesOP2y ago

>The LLM concept can only take you so far, and we're approaching the limits of what an LLM is capable of.

You don't know that. This is literally just an assertion. An unfounded one at that.

If you couldn't predict how far in 2017 the LLM concept would take us today, then you definitely have no idea how far it could actually go.

>believes we are approaching the limits of LLM size for size’s sake

Nothing to do with thinking they wouldn't improve from scale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...

An interview from Altman later clarifying.

"6. The scaling laws still hold Recently many articles have claimed that “the age of giant AI Models is already over”. This wasn’t an accurate representation of what was meant.

OpenAI’s internal data suggests the scaling laws for model performance continue to hold and making models larger will continue to yield performance. The rate of scaling can’t be maintained because OpenAI had made models millions of times bigger in just a few years and doing that going forward won’t be sustainable. That doesn’t mean that OpenAI won't continue to try to make the models bigger, it just means they will likely double or triple in size each year rather than increasing by many orders of magnitude"

Yes there are economic compute walls. But that's the kind of problem you want, not "innovation".

WendyTheWillow2y ago

Er, that's not how arguments work. What we can't know is that those trends will continue, so it's on you to demonstrate that they will, despite evidence suggesting they won't.

As for as what you linked, Altman is saying the same thing I'm saying:

> That doesn’t mean that OpenAI won't continue to try to make the models bigger, it just means they will likely double or triple in size each year rather than increasing by many orders of magnitude.

This is exactly my point; doubling or tripling of the size will be possible, but it won't result in a doubling of performance. We won't see a GPT 5 that's twice as good as GPT 4, for example. The jump from 2 to 3 was exponential. The jump from 3 to 4 was also exponential, though not as much. The jump from 4 to 5 will follow that curve, according to Altman, which means exactly what he said in my quote; the value will continue to decrease. For a 2 to 3 type jump, GPU technology would have to completely transform in capability, which there are no indications that we've found that innovation.

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famouswafflesOP2y ago

Moreover you keep saying we can't scale infinitely. Sure...but nobody is saying we have to. 4 is not as scaled from 3 as 3 was from 2. Doesn't matter, still massive gap.

WendyTheWillow2y ago

As I said already, the gap from 3 to 4 was substantially smaller than the gap between 2 to 3, and all indications are that the gap from 4 to 5 will also be further smaller than that.

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WendyTheWillow2y ago

the "Large" part of LLMs is probably done. We've gotten as far as we can with those style of models, and the next innovation will be in smaller, more targeted models.

[0] https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-chief-says-age-of-giant-ai...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/14/sam-altman-size-of-llms-wo...

famouswafflesOP2y ago

>The LLM concept can only take you so far, and we're approaching the limits of what an LLM is capable of.

You don't know that. This is literally just an assertion. An unfounded one at that.

If you couldn't predict how far in 2017 the LLM concept would take us today, then you definitely have no idea how far it could actually go.

>believes we are approaching the limits of LLM size for size’s sake

Nothing to do with thinking they wouldn't improve from scale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...

An interview from Altman later clarifying.

"6. The scaling laws still hold Recently many articles have claimed that “the age of giant AI Models is already over”. This wasn’t an accurate representation of what was meant.

Yes there are economic compute walls. But that's the kind of problem you want, not "innovation".

WendyTheWillow2y ago

Er, that's not how arguments work. What we can't know is that those trends will continue, so it's on you to demonstrate that they will, despite evidence suggesting they won't.

As for as what you linked, Altman is saying the same thing I'm saying:

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famouswafflesOP2y ago

Moreover you keep saying we can't scale infinitely. Sure...but nobody is saying we have to. 4 is not as scaled from 3 as 3 was from 2. Doesn't matter, still massive gap.

WendyTheWillow2y ago

As I said already, the gap from 3 to 4 was substantially smaller than the gap between 2 to 3, and all indications are that the gap from 4 to 5 will also be further smaller than that.

1 more reply

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