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As a member of the research community: that's nonsense. Like already pointed out: academic groups (who by no means are dependent on big tech) would jump all ove

As a member of the research community: that's nonsense. Like already pointed out: academic groups (who by no means are dependent on big tech) would jump all over that. Mamba has been out long enough that you'd already see tons of papers at arxiv showing mamba dominating transformers in all sorts of applications. But that's not happening, despite the ton of hype. That doesn't mean that mamba is nonsense. Just that it isn't the immediate transformer killer. It remains to be seen if something comes from it, eventually.

godelski 3y ago
As a member of the research community: that's nonsense. Publishing is an extremely noisy process in ML and is getting increasingly difficult for smaller non big tech collaborating labs. Reviewers' go to are: more datasets, scale, not novel. The easiest way to approach this is to work off of pretrained models. This is probably more obvious in the NLP world. I agree that Mamba doesn't solve everything and it still needs work. But I disagree with the logic that there isn't an issue of railroading.
- p1esk 3y ago
  What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. So that’s the train we’re riding at the moment. No roadblocks yet, aside from cost.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. This is incredibly naive with absolutely no scientific basis. There is no evidence that this is in scale of data nor scale of architecture. There are a number of animals with larger brains in terms of both mass and total number of neurons. An African Elephant has roughly 3x the number of neurons humans have. Dolphins beat humans in total surface area. Neanderthals are estimated to have had larger brains too! It isn't mass, neurons, neuron density, surface area. We aren't just scaled up chimps.
    - p1esk 3y ago
      Other animals with larger brains might have other bottlenecks preventing them from reaching full potential of their intelligence. Neanderthals might have been smarter than us, but went extinct for reasons not related to intelligence. But my point stands - our brains have evolved directly from apes brains and the main difference between them and us is brain size.
      - godelski 3y ago
        > Other animals with larger brains might have other bottlenecks >>> What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. Your argument is inconsistent. Very clearly everything isn't scale or we'd use other things besides transformers. Different architectures scale in different ways and everything has different inductive biases. No one doubts scale is important, but there's a lot more.
        p1esk 3y ago
        Scale is all we need for transformers (so far). It might also be all we need for ape brains. It’s not all we need for whatever elephant or dolphin brains evolved from. When this stops being the case for transformers, we will need something else. I’m just pointing out it’s not the case yet.
        godelski 3y ago
        I see no evidence of this in biology nor in ML. I've read those scale papers. I've worked on scale myself. I'll bet the farm that scale isn't all you need. But I won't be surprised if people say that it is all scale. If you really think it is all scale, train a 7T ResNet MLP based model for NLP. If scale is all you need, make a LLM without DPO or RLHF. If scale is all you need, make SD3 with a GAN. Or what about a VAE, Normalizing Flow, HMM? Do it with different optimizers. Do it with gradient free methods. Do it with different loss functions. The bitter lesson wasn't "scale is all you need." That's just a misinterpretation. Edit: It's fine to disagree. We can compete on the ideas and methods. That's good for our community. So continue down yours, and I'll continue down mine. All I ask is that since your camp is more popular, you don't block those on my side. If you're right, we'll get to AGI soon. If we're right, we still might. But if we're right and you all block us, we'll get another AI winter in between. If we're right and you all don't block us, we can progress without skipping a beat. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket. It isn't good for anyone.
algo_trader 3y ago
> Just that it isn't the immediate transformer killer. What is the best/stable-ish linear alternative for transformer right now? Especially for text generation and summarization. We have domain specific ways of over sampling and search, so we much prefer less expensive models.

godelski 3y ago

As a member of the research community: that's nonsense. Publishing is an extremely noisy process in ML and is getting increasingly difficult for smaller non big tech collaborating labs. Reviewers' go to are: more datasets, scale, not novel. The easiest way to approach this is to work off of pretrained models. This is probably more obvious in the NLP world. I agree that Mamba doesn't solve everything and it still needs work. But I disagree with the logic that there isn't an issue of railroading.

p1esk 3y ago
What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. So that’s the train we’re riding at the moment. No roadblocks yet, aside from cost.
- godelski 3y ago
  > What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. This is incredibly naive with absolutely no scientific basis. There is no evidence that this is in scale of data nor scale of architecture. There are a number of animals with larger brains in terms of both mass and total number of neurons. An African Elephant has roughly 3x the number of neurons humans have. Dolphins beat humans in total surface area. Neanderthals are estimated to have had larger brains too! It isn't mass, neurons, neuron density, surface area. We aren't just scaled up chimps.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Other animals with larger brains might have other bottlenecks preventing them from reaching full potential of their intelligence. Neanderthals might have been smarter than us, but went extinct for reasons not related to intelligence. But my point stands - our brains have evolved directly from apes brains and the main difference between them and us is brain size.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > Other animals with larger brains might have other bottlenecks >>> What’s the main difference between an ape’s brain and a human brain? Scale. Your argument is inconsistent. Very clearly everything isn't scale or we'd use other things besides transformers. Different architectures scale in different ways and everything has different inductive biases. No one doubts scale is important, but there's a lot more.
      - p1esk 3y ago
        Scale is all we need for transformers (so far). It might also be all we need for ape brains. It’s not all we need for whatever elephant or dolphin brains evolved from. When this stops being the case for transformers, we will need something else. I’m just pointing out it’s not the case yet.
        godelski 3y ago
        I see no evidence of this in biology nor in ML. I've read those scale papers. I've worked on scale myself. I'll bet the farm that scale isn't all you need. But I won't be surprised if people say that it is all scale. If you really think it is all scale, train a 7T ResNet MLP based model for NLP. If scale is all you need, make a LLM without DPO or RLHF. If scale is all you need, make SD3 with a GAN. Or what about a VAE, Normalizing Flow, HMM? Do it with different optimizers. Do it with gradient free methods. Do it with different loss functions. The bitter lesson wasn't "scale is all you need." That's just a misinterpretation. Edit: It's fine to disagree. We can compete on the ideas and methods. That's good for our community. So continue down yours, and I'll continue down mine. All I ask is that since your camp is more popular, you don't block those on my side. If you're right, we'll get to AGI soon. If we're right, we still might. But if we're right and you all block us, we'll get another AI winter in between. If we're right and you all don't block us, we can progress without skipping a beat. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket. It isn't good for anyone.

algo_trader 3y ago

> Just that it isn't the immediate transformer killer. What is the best/stable-ish linear alternative for transformer right now? Especially for text generation and summarization. We have domain specific ways of over sampling and search, so we much prefer less expensive models.