119 posts tagged “gpt”
The GPT series of Large Language Models from OpenAI.
2023
Llama 2 is about as factually accurate as GPT-4 for summaries and is 30X cheaper. Anyscale offer (cheap, fast) API access to Llama 2, so they’re not an unbiased source of information—but I really hope their claim here that Llama 2 70B provides almost equivalent summarization quality to GPT-4 holds up. Summarization is one of my favourite applications of LLMs, partly because it’s key to being able to implement Retrieval Augmented Generation against your own documents—where snippets of relevant documents are fed to the model and used to answer a user’s question. Having a really high performance openly licensed summarization model is a very big deal.
airoboros LMoE. airoboros provides a system for fine-tuning Large Language Models. The latest release adds support for LMoE—LoRA Mixture of Experts. GPT-4 is strongly rumoured to work as a mixture of experts—several (maybe 8?) 220B models each with a different specialty working together to produce the best result. This is the first open source (Apache 2) implementation of that pattern that I’ve seen.
Study claims ChatGPT is losing capability, but some experts aren’t convinced. Benj Edwards talks about the ongoing debate as to whether or not GPT-4 is getting weaker over time. I remain skeptical of those claims—I think it’s more likely that people are seeing more of the flaws now that the novelty has worn off.
I’m quoted in this piece: “Honestly, the lack of release notes and transparency may be the biggest story here. How are we meant to build dependable software on top of a platform that changes in completely undocumented and mysterious ways every few months?”
OpenAI: Function calling and other API updates. Huge set of announcements from OpenAI today. A bunch of price reductions, but the things that most excite me are the new gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model which offers a 16,000 token context limit (4x the existing 3.5 turbo model) at a price of $0.003 per 1K input tokens and $0.004 per 1K output tokens—1/10th the price of GPT-4 8k.
The other big new feature: functions! You can now send JSON schema defining one or more functions to GPT 3.5 and GPT-4—those models will then return a blob of JSON describing a function they want you to call (if they determine that one should be called). Your code executes the function and passes the results back to the model to continue the execution flow.
This is effectively an implementation of the ReAct pattern, with models that have been fine-tuned to execute it.
They acknowledge the risk of prompt injection (though not by name) in the post: “We are working to mitigate these and other risks. Developers can protect their applications by only consuming information from trusted tools and by including user confirmation steps before performing actions with real-world impact, such as sending an email, posting online, or making a purchase.”
Understanding GPT tokenizers
Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next.
[... 1,575 words]Examples of weird GPT-4 behavior for the string “ davidjl”. GPT-4, when told to repeat or otherwise process the string “ davidjl” (note the leading space character), treats it as “jndl” or “jspb” or “JDL” instead. It turns out “ davidjl” has its own single token in the tokenizer: token ID 23282, presumably dating back to the GPT-2 days.
Riley Goodside refers to these as “glitch tokens”.
This token might refer to Reddit user davidjl123 who ranks top of the league for the old /r/counting subreddit, with 163,477 posts there which presumably ended up in older training data.
Language models can explain neurons in language models (via) Fascinating interactive paper by OpenAI, describing how they used GPT-4 to analyze the concepts tracked by individual neurons in their much older GPT-2 model. “We generated cluster labels by embedding each neuron explanation using the OpenAI Embeddings API, then clustering them and asking GPT-4 to label each cluster.”
GPT-3 token encoder and decoder. I built an Observable notebook with an interface to encode, decode and search through GPT-3 tokens, building on top of a notebook by EJ Fox and Ian Johnson.
Although fine-tuning can feel like the more natural option—training on data is how GPT learned all of its other knowledge, after all—we generally do not recommend it as a way to teach the model knowledge. Fine-tuning is better suited to teaching specialized tasks or styles, and is less reliable for factual recall. [...] In contrast, message inputs are like short-term memory. When you insert knowledge into a message, it's like taking an exam with open notes. With notes in hand, the model is more likely to arrive at correct answers.
— Ted Sanders, OpenAI
For example, if you prompt GPT-3 with "Mary had a," it usually completes the sentence with "little lamb." That's because there are probably thousands of examples of "Mary had a little lamb" in GPT-3's training data set, making it a sensible completion. But if you add more context in the prompt, such as "In the hospital, Mary had a," the result will change and return words like "baby" or "series of tests."
Closed AI Models Make Bad Baselines (via) The NLP academic research community are facing a tough challenge: the state-of-the-art in large language models, GPT-4, is entirely closed which means papers that compare it to other models lack replicability and credibility. “We make the case that as far as research and scientific publications are concerned, the “closed” models (as defined below) cannot be meaningfully studied, and they should not become a “universal baseline”, the way BERT was for some time widely considered to be.”
Anna Rogers proposes a new rule for this kind of research: “That which is not open and reasonably reproducible cannot be considered a requisite baseline.”
Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models (via) The latest example of an open source large language model you can run your own hardware. This one is particularly interesting because the entire thing is under the Apache 2 license. Cerebras are an AI hardware company offering a product with 850,000 cores—this release was trained on their hardware, presumably to demonstrate its capabilities. The model comes in seven sizes from 111 million to 13 billion parameters, and the smaller sizes can be tried directly on Hugging Face.
scrapeghost (via) Scraping is a really interesting application for large language model tools like GPT3. James Turk’s scrapeghost is a very neatly designed entrant into this space—it’s a Python library and CLI tool that can be pointed at any URL and given a roughly defined schema (using a neat mini schema language) which will then use GPT3 to scrape the page and try to return the results in the supplied format.
GPT-4, like GPT-3 before it, has a capability overhang; at the time of release, neither OpenAI or its various deployment partners have a clue as to the true extent of GPT-4's capability surface - that's something that we'll get to collectively discover in the coming years. This also means we don't know the full extent of plausible misuses or harms.
The Age of AI has begun. Bill Gates calls GPT-class large language models “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface”. His essay here focuses on the philanthropy angle, mostly from the point of view of AI applications in healthcare, education and concerns about keeping access to these new technologies as equitable as possible.
As an NLP researcher I'm kind of worried about this field after 10-20 years. Feels like these oversized LLMs are going to eat up this field and I'm sitting in my chair thinking, "What's the point of my research when GPT-4 can do it better?"
I expect GPT-4 will have a LOT of applications in web scraping
The increased 32,000 token limit will be large enough to send it the full DOM of most pages, serialized to HTML - then ask questions to extract data
Or... take a screenshot and use the GPT4 image input mode to ask questions about the visually rendered page instead!
Might need to dust off all of those old semantic web dreams, because the world's information is rapidly becoming fully machine readable
— Me
GPT-4 Developer Livestream. 25 minutes of live demos from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman at the GPT-4 launch. These demos are all fascinating, including code writing and multimodal vision inputs. The one that really struck me is when Greg pasted in a copy of the tax code and asked GPT-4 to answer some sophisticated tax questions, involving step-by-step calculations that cited parts of the tax code it was working with.
GPT-4 Technical Report (PDF). 98 pages of much more detailed information about GPT-4. The appendices are particularly interesting, including examples of advanced prompt engineering as well as examples of harmful outputs before and after tuning attempts to try and suppress them.
We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. [...] We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.
— OpenAI
Stanford Alpaca, and the acceleration of on-device large language model development
On Saturday 11th March I wrote about how Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment. Today is Monday. Let’s look at what’s happened in the past three days.
[... 2,055 words]ChatGPT’s API is So Good and Cheap, It Makes Most Text Generating AI Obsolete (via) Max Woolf on the quite frankly weird economics of the ChatGPT API: it’s 1/10th the price of GPT-3 Da Vinci and appears to be equivalent (if not more) capable. “But it is very hard to economically justify not using ChatGPT as a starting point for a business need and migrating to a more bespoke infrastructure later as needed, and that’s what OpenAI is counting on. [...] I don’t envy startups whose primary business is text generation right now.”
Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.
[... 1,815 words]Running LLaMA 7B on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro with llama.cpp. I got Facebook’s LLaMA 7B to run on my MacBook Pro using llama.cpp (a “port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C/C++”) by Georgi Gerganov. It works! I’ve been hoping to run a GPT-3 class language model on my own hardware for ages, and now it’s possible to do exactly that. The model itself ends up being just 4GB after applying Georgi’s script to “quantize the model to 4-bits”.
ChatGPT couldn’t access the internet, even though it really looked like it could
A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking it to make use of the content on that page in some way.
[... 1,745 words]How to Wrap Our Heads Around These New Shockingly Fluent Chatbots. I was a guest on KQED Forum this morning, a live radio documentary and call-in show hosted by Alexis Madrigal. Ted Chiang and Claire Leibowicz were the other guests: we talked about ChatGPT and and the new generation of AI-powered tools.
OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs. The ChatGPT API is a new model called “gpt-3.5-turbo” and is priced at 1/10th of the price of text-davinci-003, previously the most powerful GPT-3 model. Whisper (speech to text transcription) is now available via an API as well, priced at 36 cents per hour of audio.
Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.”
FlexGen (via) This looks like a very big deal. FlexGen is a paper and accompanying code that massively reduces the resources needed to run some of the current top performing open source GPT-style large language models. People on Hacker News report being able to use it to run models like opt-30b on their own hardware, and it looks like it opens up the possibility of running even larger models on hardware available outside of dedicated research labs.
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.
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