Takeaways/Observations/Advice from my #NeurIPS2018 experience (thread):
❄️(1): deep learning seems stagnant in terms of impactful and new ideas
❄️(2): on the flip side, deep learning is providing tremendous opportunities for building powerful applications (could be seen from the amount of creativity and value of works presented in workshops such as ML for Health and Creativity)
❄️(3): the rise of deep learning applications is all thanks to the continued integration of software tools (open source) and hardware (GPUs and TPUs)
❄️(4): Conversational AI is important because it encompasses most subfields in NLP... also, embedding social capabilities into these type of AI systems is a challenging task but very important one going forward
❄️(5): it's important to start to think about how to transition from supervised learning to problems involving semi-supervised learning and beyond. Reinforcement learning seems to be the next frontier. BTW, Bayesian deep learning is a thing!?
❄️(6): we should not avoid the questions or the thoughts of inspiring our AI algorithms based on biological systems just because people are saying this is bad... there is still a whole lot to learn from neuroscience
❄️(7): when we use the word "algorithms" to refer to AI systems it seems to be used in negative ways by the media... what if we use the term "models" instead? (rephrased from Hanna Wallach)
❄️(8): we can embrace the gains of deep learning and revise our traditional learning systems based on what we have learned from modern deep learning techniques (this was my favorite piece of advice)
❄️(9): the ease of applying machine learning to different problems has sparked leaderboard chasing... let's all be careful of those short-term rewards
❄️(10): there is a ton of noise in the field of AI... when you read about AI papers, systems and technologies just be aware of that
❄️(11): causal reasoning needs to be paid close attention... especially as we begin to heavily use AI systems to make important decisions in our lives
❄️(12): efforts in diversification seems to have amplified healthy interactions between young and prominent members of the AI community
❄️(13): we can expect to see more multimodal systems and environments being used and leveraged to help with learning in various settings (e.g., conversation, simulations, etc.)
❄️(14): let's get serious about reproducibility... this goes for all sub-disciplines in the field of AI
❄️(15): more efforts need to be invested in finding ways to properly evaluate different types of machine learning systems... this was a resonant theme at the conference...from the NLP people to the statisticians to the reinforcement learning people... it's a serious problem
I will formalize and expound on all of these observations, takeaways, and advice learned from my NeurIPS experience in a future post (will be posted directly at @dair_ai)... at the moment, I am still trying to put together the resources (links, slides, papers, etc.)
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JUST IN: Google DeepMind releases Gemma, a series of open models inspired by the same research and tech used for Gemini.
Open models fit various use cases so this is a very smart move from Google.
Great to see that Google recognizes the importance of openness in AI science and technology.
There are 2B (trained on 2T tokens) and 7B (trained on 6T tokens) models including base and instruction tuned versions. Trained on a context length of 8192 tokens.
Commercial use is allowed.
These are not multimodal models but based on the reported experimental results they appear to outperform Llama 2 7B and Mistral 7B.
I am excited about those MATH, HumanEval, GSM8K, and AGIEval results. These are really incredible results for a model this size.
Excited to dive deeper into these models. The model prompting guide is dropping soon. Stay tuned!
When I said outperforms other models, I meant generally outperforms them on all the benchmarks. Llama has a lot of catching up to do but it is interesting to see Mistral 7B trail Gemma very closely. These numbers don't really mean much in the context of real-world applications.
If you follow me here on X, you know how excited I get about unlocking unique value and use cases with small language models (SLMs). It will also be fun to run these locally and other other small devices. As I have been saying, SLMs are underexplored. It's a mistake to just see them as research artifacts.
Google DeepMind just announced Gemini, their largest and most capable AI model.
A short summary of all you need to know:
1) What it is - Built with multimodal support from the ground up. Remarkable multimodal reasoning capabilities across text, images, video, audio, and code. Nano, Pro, and Ultra models are available to support different scenarios such as efficiency/scale and support complex capabilities.
2) Performance - The results on the standard benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, Big-Bench-Hard, etc.) show improvement compared to GPT-4 (though not by a lot). Still very impressive!
3) Outperforming human experts - They claim that Gemini is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), a popular benchmark to test the knowledge and problem-solving abilities of AI models.
4) Capabilities- Gemini surpasses SOTA performance on a bunch of multimodal tasks like infographic understanding and mathematical reasoning in visual contexts. There was a lot of focus on multimodal reasoning capabilities with the ability to analyze documents and uncover knowledge that's hard to discern. The model capabilities reported are multimodality, multilinguality, factuality, summarization, math/science, long-context, reasoning, and more. It's probably one of the most capable models by the looks of it.
5) Trying it out - Apparently, a fine-tuned Gemini Pro is available to use via Bard. Can't wait to experiment with this soon.
6) Availability - Models will be made available for devs on Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI by Dec 13th.
blog:
technical report:
Here is the model verifying a student's solution to a physics problem. Huge implications in education. Will be taking a very close look at applications here.
As is becoming common now, very little to no details on architecture but it's great to see distillation useful for the Nano series models.
It provides an AI chat-based assistant within the Jupyter environment that allows you to generate code, summarize content, create comments, fix errors, etc.
You can even generate entire notebooks using text prompts!
MPT-30B training data. "To build 8k support into MPT-30B efficiently, we first pre-trained on 1T tokens using sequences that were 2k tokens long, and continued training for an additional 50B tokens using sequences that were 8k tokens long."