Podcasts about icml

Professor Randall Balestriero joins us to discuss neural network geometry, spline theory, and emerging phenomena in deep learning, based on research presented at ICML. Topics include the delayed emergence of adversarial robustness in neural networks ("grokking"), geometric interpretations of neural networks via spline theory, and challenges in reconstruction learning. We also cover geometric analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) for toxicity detection and the relationship between intrinsic dimensionality and model control in RLHF.SPONSOR MESSAGES:***CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale deployments.https://centml.ai/pricing/Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on o-series style reasoning and AGI. Are you interested in working on reasoning, or getting involved in their events?Goto https://tufalabs.ai/***Randall Balestrierohttps://x.com/randall_balestrhttps://randallbalestriero.github.io/Show notes and transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3lufge4upq5gy0ug75j4a/RANDALLSHOW.pdf?rlkey=nbemgpa0jhawt1e86rx7372e4&dl=0TOC:- Introduction - 00:00:00: Introduction- Neural Network Geometry and Spline Theory - 00:01:41: Neural Network Geometry and Spline Theory - 00:07:41: Deep Networks Always Grok - 00:11:39: Grokking and Adversarial Robustness - 00:16:09: Double Descent and Catastrophic Forgetting- Reconstruction Learning - 00:18:49: Reconstruction Learning - 00:24:15: Frequency Bias in Neural Networks- Geometric Analysis of Neural Networks - 00:29:02: Geometric Analysis of Neural Networks - 00:34:41: Adversarial Examples and Region Concentration- LLM Safety and Geometric Analysis - 00:40:05: LLM Safety and Geometric Analysis - 00:46:11: Toxicity Detection in LLMs - 00:52:24: Intrinsic Dimensionality and Model Control - 00:58:07: RLHF and High-Dimensional Spaces- Conclusion - 01:02:13: Neural Tangent Kernel - 01:08:07: ConclusionREFS:[00:01:35] Humayun – Deep network geometry & input space partitioninghttps://arxiv.org/html/2408.04809v1[00:03:55] Balestriero & Paris – Linking deep networks to adaptive spline operatorshttps://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/balestriero18b/balestriero18b.pdf[00:13:55] Song et al. – Gradient-based white-box adversarial attackshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2012.14965[00:16:05] Humayun, Balestriero & Baraniuk – Grokking phenomenon & emergent robustnesshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15555[00:18:25] Humayun – Training dynamics & double descent via linear region evolutionhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12977[00:20:15] Balestriero – Power diagram partitions in DNN decision boundarieshttps://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08443[00:23:00] Frankle & Carbin – Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for network pruninghttps://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635[00:24:00] Belkin et al. – Double descent phenomenon in modern MLhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11118[00:25:55] Balestriero et al. – Batch normalization's regularization effectshttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.14778[00:29:35] EU – EU AI Act 2024 with compute restrictionshttps://www.lw.com/admin/upload/SiteAttachments/EU-AI-Act-Navigating-a-Brave-New-World.pdf[00:39:30] Humayun, Balestriero & Baraniuk – SplineCam: Visualizing deep network geometryhttps://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2023/papers/Humayun_SplineCam_Exact_Visualization_and_Characterization_of_Deep_Network_Geometry_and_CVPR_2023_paper.pdf[00:40:40] Carlini – Trade-offs between adversarial robustness and accuracyhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.20099[00:44:55] Balestriero & LeCun – Limitations of reconstruction-based learning methodshttps://openreview.net/forum?id=ez7w0Ss4g9(truncated, see shownotes PDF)

Send us a textStefan Feuerriegel is the Head of the Institute of AI in Management at LMU.His team consistently publishes work on causal machine learning at top AI conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, and more.At the same time, they help businesses implement causal methods in practice.They worked on projects with companies like ABB Hitachi, and Booking.com.Stefan believes his team thrives because of its diversity and aims to bring more causal machine learning to medicine.I had a great conversation with him, and I hope you'll enjoy it too!>> Guest info:Stefan Feuerriegel is a professor and the Head of the Institute of AI in Management at LMU. Previously, he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. and ran his own AI startup.>> Episode Links:Papers- Feuerriegel, S. et al. (2024) - Causal machine learning for predicting treatment outcomes (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-02902-1)- Kuzmanivic, M. et al. (2024) - Causal Machine Learning for Cost-Effective Allocation of Development Aid (https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16986)- Schröder, M. et al. (2024) - Conformal Prediction for Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03094)>> WWW: https://www.som.lmu.de/ai/>> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-feuerriegel/Support the showCausal Bandits PodcastCausal AI || Causal Machine Learning || Causal Inference & DiscoveryWeb: https://causalbanditspodcast.comConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandermolak/Join Causal Python Weekly: https://causalpython.io The Causal Book: https://amzn.to/3QhsRz4

Applications for the 2025 AI Engineer Summit are up, and you can save the date for AIE Singapore in April and AIE World's Fair 2025 in June.Happy new year, and thanks for 100 great episodes! Please let us know what you want to see/hear for the next 100!Full YouTube Episode with Slides/ChartsLike and subscribe and hit that bell to get notifs!Timestamps* 00:00 Welcome to the 100th Episode!* 00:19 Reflecting on the Journey* 00:47 AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact* 03:15 Latent Space Live and AI Conferences* 09:44 The Competitive AI Landscape* 21:45 Synthetic Data and Future Trends* 35:53 Creative Writing with AI* 36:12 Legal and Ethical Issues in AI* 38:18 The Data War: GPU Poor vs. GPU Rich* 39:12 The Rise of GPU Ultra Rich* 40:47 Emerging Trends in AI Models* 45:31 The Multi-Modality War* 01:05:31 The Future of AI Benchmarks* 01:13:17 Pionote and Frontier Models* 01:13:47 Niche Models and Base Models* 01:14:30 State Space Models and RWKB* 01:15:48 Inference Race and Price Wars* 01:22:16 Major AI Themes of the Year* 01:22:48 AI Rewind: January to March* 01:26:42 AI Rewind: April to June* 01:33:12 AI Rewind: July to September* 01:34:59 AI Rewind: October to December* 01:39:53 Year-End Reflections and PredictionsTranscript[00:00:00] Welcome to the 100th Episode![00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host Swyx for the 100th time today.[00:00:12] swyx: Yay, um, and we're so glad that, yeah, you know, everyone has, uh, followed us in this journey. How do you feel about it? 100 episodes.[00:00:19] Alessio: Yeah, I know.[00:00:19] Reflecting on the Journey[00:00:19] Alessio: Almost two years that we've been doing this. We've had four different studios. Uh, we've had a lot of changes. You know, we used to do this lightning round. When we first started that we didn't like, and we tried to change the question. The answer[00:00:32] swyx: was cursor and perplexity.[00:00:34] Alessio: Yeah, I love mid journey. It's like, do you really not like anything else?[00:00:38] Alessio: Like what's, what's the unique thing? And I think, yeah, we, we've also had a lot more research driven content. You know, we had like 3DAO, we had, you know. Jeremy Howard, we had more folks like that.[00:00:47] AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact[00:00:47] Alessio: I think we want to do more of that too in the new year, like having, uh, some of the Gemini folks, both on the research and the applied side.[00:00:54] Alessio: Yeah, but it's been a ton of fun. I think we both started, I wouldn't say as a joke, we were kind of like, Oh, we [00:01:00] should do a podcast. And I think we kind of caught the right wave, obviously. And I think your rise of the AI engineer posts just kind of get people. Sombra to congregate, and then the AI engineer summit.[00:01:11] Alessio: And that's why when I look at our growth chart, it's kind of like a proxy for like the AI engineering industry as a whole, which is almost like, like, even if we don't do that much, we keep growing just because there's so many more AI engineers. So did you expect that growth or did you expect that would take longer for like the AI engineer thing to kind of like become, you know, everybody talks about it today.[00:01:32] swyx: So, the sign of that, that we have won is that Gartner puts it at the top of the hype curve right now. So Gartner has called the peak in AI engineering. I did not expect, um, to what level. I knew that I was correct when I called it because I did like two months of work going into that. But I didn't know, You know, how quickly it could happen, and obviously there's a chance that I could be wrong.[00:01:52] swyx: But I think, like, most people have come around to that concept. Hacker News hates it, which is a good sign. But there's enough people that have defined it, you know, GitHub, when [00:02:00] they launched GitHub Models, which is the Hugging Face clone, they put AI engineers in the banner, like, above the fold, like, in big So I think it's like kind of arrived as a meaningful and useful definition.[00:02:12] swyx: I think people are trying to figure out where the boundaries are. I think that was a lot of the quote unquote drama that happens behind the scenes at the World's Fair in June. Because I think there's a lot of doubt or questions about where ML engineering stops and AI engineering starts. That's a useful debate to be had.[00:02:29] swyx: In some sense, I actually anticipated that as well. So I intentionally did not. Put a firm definition there because most of the successful definitions are necessarily underspecified and it's actually useful to have different perspectives and you don't have to specify everything from the outset.[00:02:45] Alessio: Yeah, I was at um, AWS reInvent and the line to get into like the AI engineering talk, so to speak, which is, you know, applied AI and whatnot was like, there are like hundreds of people just in line to go in.[00:02:56] Alessio: I think that's kind of what enabled me. People, right? Which is what [00:03:00] you kind of talked about. It's like, Hey, look, you don't actually need a PhD, just, yeah, just use the model. And then maybe we'll talk about some of the blind spots that you get as an engineer with the earlier posts that we also had on on the sub stack.[00:03:11] Alessio: But yeah, it's been a heck of a heck of a two years.[00:03:14] swyx: Yeah.[00:03:15] Latent Space Live and AI Conferences[00:03:15] swyx: You know, I was, I was trying to view the conference as like, so NeurIPS is I think like 16, 17, 000 people. And the Latent Space Live event that we held there was 950 signups. I think. The AI world, the ML world is still very much research heavy. And that's as it should be because ML is very much in a research phase.[00:03:34] swyx: But as we move this entire field into production, I think that ratio inverts into becoming more engineering heavy. So at least I think engineering should be on the same level, even if it's never as prestigious, like it'll always be low status because at the end of the day, you're manipulating APIs or whatever.[00:03:51] swyx: But Yeah, wrapping GPTs, but there's going to be an increasing stack and an art to doing these, these things well. And I, you know, I [00:04:00] think that's what we're focusing on for the podcast, the conference and basically everything I do seems to make sense. And I think we'll, we'll talk about the trends here that apply.[00:04:09] swyx: It's, it's just very strange. So, like, there's a mix of, like, keeping on top of research while not being a researcher and then putting that research into production. So, like, people always ask me, like, why are you covering Neuralibs? Like, this is a ML research conference and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, we're not going to, to like, understand everything Or reproduce every single paper, but the stuff that is being found here is going to make it through into production at some point, you hope.[00:04:32] swyx: And then actually like when I talk to the researchers, they actually get very excited because they're like, oh, you guys are actually caring about how this goes into production and that's what they really really want. The measure of success is previously just peer review, right? Getting 7s and 8s on their um, Academic review conferences and stuff like citations is one metric, but money is a better metric.[00:04:51] Alessio: Money is a better metric. Yeah, and there were about 2200 people on the live stream or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Hundred on the live stream. So [00:05:00] I try my best to moderate, but it was a lot spicier in person with Jonathan and, and Dylan. Yeah, that it was in the chat on YouTube.[00:05:06] swyx: I would say that I actually also created.[00:05:09] swyx: Layen Space Live in order to address flaws that are perceived in academic conferences. This is not NeurIPS specific, it's ICML, NeurIPS. Basically, it's very sort of oriented towards the PhD student, uh, market, job market, right? Like literally all, basically everyone's there to advertise their research and skills and get jobs.[00:05:28] swyx: And then obviously all the, the companies go there to hire them. And I think that's great for the individual researchers, but for people going there to get info is not great because you have to read between the lines, bring a ton of context in order to understand every single paper. So what is missing is effectively what I ended up doing, which is domain by domain, go through and recap the best of the year.[00:05:48] swyx: Survey the field. And there are, like NeurIPS had a, uh, I think ICML had a like a position paper track, NeurIPS added a benchmarks, uh, datasets track. These are ways in which to address that [00:06:00] issue. Uh, there's always workshops as well. Every, every conference has, you know, a last day of workshops and stuff that provide more of an overview.[00:06:06] swyx: But they're not specifically prompted to do so. And I think really, uh, Organizing a conference is just about getting good speakers and giving them the correct prompts. And then they will just go and do that thing and they do a very good job of it. So I think Sarah did a fantastic job with the startups prompt.[00:06:21] swyx: I can't list everybody, but we did best of 2024 in startups, vision, open models. Post transformers, synthetic data, small models, and agents. And then the last one was the, uh, and then we also did a quick one on reasoning with Nathan Lambert. And then the last one, obviously, was the debate that people were very hyped about.[00:06:39] swyx: It was very awkward. And I'm really, really thankful for John Franco, basically, who stepped up to challenge Dylan. Because Dylan was like, yeah, I'll do it. But He was pro scaling. And I think everyone who is like in AI is pro scaling, right? So you need somebody who's ready to publicly say, no, we've hit a wall.[00:06:57] swyx: So that means you're saying Sam Altman's wrong. [00:07:00] You're saying, um, you know, everyone else is wrong. It helps that this was the day before Ilya went on, went up on stage and then said pre training has hit a wall. And data has hit a wall. So actually Jonathan ended up winning, and then Ilya supported that statement, and then Noam Brown on the last day further supported that statement as well.[00:07:17] swyx: So it's kind of interesting that I think the consensus kind of going in was that we're not done scaling, like you should believe in a better lesson. And then, four straight days in a row, you had Sepp Hochreiter, who is the creator of the LSTM, along with everyone's favorite OG in AI, which is Juergen Schmidhuber.[00:07:34] swyx: He said that, um, we're pre trading inside a wall, or like, we've run into a different kind of wall. And then we have, you know John Frankel, Ilya, and then Noam Brown are all saying variations of the same thing, that we have hit some kind of wall in the status quo of what pre trained, scaling large pre trained models has looked like, and we need a new thing.[00:07:54] swyx: And obviously the new thing for people is some make, either people are calling it inference time compute or test time [00:08:00] compute. I think the collective terminology has been inference time, and I think that makes sense because test time, calling it test, meaning, has a very pre trained bias, meaning that the only reason for running inference at all is to test your model.[00:08:11] swyx: That is not true. Right. Yeah. So, so, I quite agree that. OpenAI seems to have adopted, or the community seems to have adopted this terminology of ITC instead of TTC. And that, that makes a lot of sense because like now we care about inference, even right down to compute optimality. Like I actually interviewed this author who recovered or reviewed the Chinchilla paper.[00:08:31] swyx: Chinchilla paper is compute optimal training, but what is not stated in there is it's pre trained compute optimal training. And once you start caring about inference, compute optimal training, you have a different scaling law. And in a way that we did not know last year.[00:08:45] Alessio: I wonder, because John is, he's also on the side of attention is all you need.[00:08:49] Alessio: Like he had the bet with Sasha. So I'm curious, like he doesn't believe in scaling, but he thinks the transformer, I wonder if he's still. So, so,[00:08:56] swyx: so he, obviously everything is nuanced and you know, I told him to play a character [00:09:00] for this debate, right? So he actually does. Yeah. He still, he still believes that we can scale more.[00:09:04] swyx: Uh, he just assumed the character to be very game for, for playing this debate. So even more kudos to him that he assumed a position that he didn't believe in and still won the debate.[00:09:16] Alessio: Get rekt, Dylan. Um, do you just want to quickly run through some of these things? Like, uh, Sarah's presentation, just the highlights.[00:09:24] swyx: Yeah, we can't go through everyone's slides, but I pulled out some things as a factor of, like, stuff that we were going to talk about. And we'll[00:09:30] Alessio: publish[00:09:31] swyx: the rest. Yeah, we'll publish on this feed the best of 2024 in those domains. And hopefully people can benefit from the work that our speakers have done.[00:09:39] swyx: But I think it's, uh, these are just good slides. And I've been, I've been looking for a sort of end of year recaps from, from people.[00:09:44] The Competitive AI Landscape[00:09:44] swyx: The field has progressed a lot. You know, I think the max ELO in 2023 on LMSys used to be 1200 for LMSys ELOs. And now everyone is at least at, uh, 1275 in their ELOs, and this is across Gemini, Chadjibuti, [00:10:00] Grok, O1.[00:10:01] swyx: ai, which with their E Large model, and Enthopic, of course. It's a very, very competitive race. There are multiple Frontier labs all racing, but there is a clear tier zero Frontier. And then there's like a tier one. It's like, I wish I had everything else. Tier zero is extremely competitive. It's effectively now three horse race between Gemini, uh, Anthropic and OpenAI.[00:10:21] swyx: I would say that people are still holding out a candle for XAI. XAI, I think, for some reason, because their API was very slow to roll out, is not included in these metrics. So it's actually quite hard to put on there. As someone who also does charts, XAI is continually snubbed because they don't work well with the benchmarking people.[00:10:42] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little trivia for why XAI always gets ignored. The other thing is market share. So these are slides from Sarah. We have it up on the screen. It has gone from very heavily open AI. So we have some numbers and estimates. These are from RAMP. Estimates of open AI market share in [00:11:00] December 2023.[00:11:01] swyx: And this is basically, what is it, GPT being 95 percent of production traffic. And I think if you correlate that with stuff that we asked. Harrison Chase on the LangChain episode, it was true. And then CLAUD 3 launched mid middle of this year. I think CLAUD 3 launched in March, CLAUD 3. 5 Sonnet was in June ish.[00:11:23] swyx: And you can start seeing the market share shift towards opening, uh, towards that topic, uh, very, very aggressively. The more recent one is Gemini. So if I scroll down a little bit, this is an even more recent dataset. So RAM's dataset ends in September 2 2. 2024. Gemini has basically launched a price war at the low end, uh, with Gemini Flash, uh, being basically free for personal use.[00:11:44] swyx: Like, I think people don't understand the free tier. It's something like a billion tokens per day. Unless you're trying to abuse it, you cannot really exhaust your free tier on Gemini. They're really trying to get you to use it. They know they're in like third place, um, fourth place, depending how you, how you count.[00:11:58] swyx: And so they're going after [00:12:00] the Lower tier first, and then, you know, maybe the upper tier later, but yeah, Gemini Flash, according to OpenRouter, is now 50 percent of their OpenRouter requests. Obviously, these are the small requests. These are small, cheap requests that are mathematically going to be more.[00:12:15] swyx: The smart ones obviously are still going to OpenAI. But, you know, it's a very, very big shift in the market. Like basically 2023, 2022, To going into 2024 opening has gone from nine five market share to Yeah. Reasonably somewhere between 50 to 75 market share.[00:12:29] Alessio: Yeah. I'm really curious how ramped does the attribution to the model?[00:12:32] Alessio: If it's API, because I think it's all credit card spin. . Well, but it's all, the credit card doesn't say maybe. Maybe the, maybe when they do expenses, they upload the PDF, but yeah, the, the German I think makes sense. I think that was one of my main 2024 takeaways that like. The best small model companies are the large labs, which is not something I would have thought that the open source kind of like long tail would be like the small model.[00:12:53] swyx: Yeah, different sizes of small models we're talking about here, right? Like so small model here for Gemini is AB, [00:13:00] right? Uh, mini. We don't know what the small model size is, but yeah, it's probably in the double digits or maybe single digits, but probably double digits. The open source community has kind of focused on the one to three B size.[00:13:11] swyx: Mm-hmm . Yeah. Maybe[00:13:12] swyx: zero, maybe 0.5 B uh, that's moon dream and that is small for you then, then that's great. It makes sense that we, we have a range for small now, which is like, may, maybe one to five B. Yeah. I'll even put that at, at, at the high end. And so this includes Gemma from Gemini as well. But also includes the Apple Foundation models, which I think Apple Foundation is 3B.[00:13:32] Alessio: Yeah. No, that's great. I mean, I think in the start small just meant cheap. I think today small is actually a more nuanced discussion, you know, that people weren't really having before.[00:13:43] swyx: Yeah, we can keep going. This is a slide that I smiley disagree with Sarah. She's pointing to the scale SEAL leaderboard. I think the Researchers that I talked with at NeurIPS were kind of positive on this because basically you need private test [00:14:00] sets to prevent contamination.[00:14:02] swyx: And Scale is one of maybe three or four people this year that has really made an effort in doing a credible private test set leaderboard. Llama405B does well compared to Gemini and GPT 40. And I think that's good. I would say that. You know, it's good to have an open model that is that big, that does well on those metrics.[00:14:23] swyx: But anyone putting 405B in production will tell you, if you scroll down a little bit to the artificial analysis numbers, that it is very slow and very expensive to infer. Um, it doesn't even fit on like one node. of, uh, of H100s. Cerebras will be happy to tell you they can serve 4 or 5B on their super large chips.[00:14:42] swyx: But, um, you know, if you need to do anything custom to it, you're still kind of constrained. So, is 4 or 5B really that relevant? Like, I think most people are basically saying that they only use 4 or 5B as a teacher model to distill down to something. Even Meta is doing it. So with Lama 3. [00:15:00] 3 launched, they only launched the 70B because they use 4 or 5B to distill the 70B.[00:15:03] swyx: So I don't know if like open source is keeping up. I think they're the, the open source industrial complex is very invested in telling you that the, if the gap is narrowing, I kind of disagree. I think that the gap is widening with O1. I think there are very, very smart people trying to narrow that gap and they should.[00:15:22] swyx: I really wish them success, but you cannot use a chart that is nearing 100 in your saturation chart. And look, the distance between open source and closed source is narrowing. Of course it's going to narrow because you're near 100. This is stupid. But in metrics that matter, is open source narrowing?[00:15:38] swyx: Probably not for O1 for a while. And it's really up to the open source guys to figure out if they can match O1 or not.[00:15:46] Alessio: I think inference time compute is bad for open source just because, you know, Doc can donate the flops at training time, but he cannot donate the flops at inference time. So it's really hard to like actually keep up on that axis.[00:15:59] Alessio: Big, big business [00:16:00] model shift. So I don't know what that means for the GPU clouds. I don't know what that means for the hyperscalers, but obviously the big labs have a lot of advantage. Because, like, it's not a static artifact that you're putting the compute in. You're kind of doing that still, but then you're putting a lot of computed inference too.[00:16:17] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, Llama4 will be reasoning oriented. We talked with Thomas Shalom. Um, kudos for getting that episode together. That was really nice. Good, well timed. Actually, I connected with the AI meta guy, uh, at NeurIPS, and, um, yeah, we're going to coordinate something for Llama4. Yeah, yeah,[00:16:32] Alessio: and our friend, yeah.[00:16:33] Alessio: Clara Shi just joined to lead the business agent side. So I'm sure we'll have her on in the new year.[00:16:39] swyx: Yeah. So, um, my comment on, on the business model shift, this is super interesting. Apparently it is wide knowledge that OpenAI wanted more than 6. 6 billion dollars for their fundraise. They wanted to raise, you know, higher, and they did not.[00:16:51] swyx: And what that means is basically like, it's very convenient that we're not getting GPT 5, which would have been a larger pre train. We should have a lot of upfront money. And [00:17:00] instead we're, we're converting fixed costs into variable costs, right. And passing it on effectively to the customer. And it's so much easier to take margin there because you can directly attribute it to like, Oh, you're using this more.[00:17:12] swyx: Therefore you, you pay more of the cost and I'll just slap a margin in there. So like that lets you control your growth margin and like tie your. Your spend, or your sort of inference spend, accordingly. And it's just really interesting to, that this change in the sort of inference paradigm has arrived exactly at the same time that the funding environment for pre training is effectively drying up, kind of.[00:17:36] swyx: I feel like maybe the VCs are very in tune with research anyway, so like, they would have noticed this, but, um, it's just interesting.[00:17:43] Alessio: Yeah, and I was looking back at our yearly recap of last year. Yeah. And the big thing was like the mixed trial price fights, you know, and I think now it's almost like there's nowhere to go, like, you know, Gemini Flash is like basically giving it away for free.[00:17:55] Alessio: So I think this is a good way for the labs to generate more revenue and pass down [00:18:00] some of the compute to the customer. I think they're going to[00:18:02] swyx: keep going. I think that 2, will come.[00:18:05] Alessio: Yeah, I know. Totally. I mean, next year, the first thing I'm doing is signing up for Devin. Signing up for the pro chat GBT.[00:18:12] Alessio: Just to try. I just want to see what does it look like to spend a thousand dollars a month on AI?[00:18:17] swyx: Yes. Yes. I think if your, if your, your job is a, at least AI content creator or VC or, you know, someone who, whose job it is to stay on, stay on top of things, you should already be spending like a thousand dollars a month on, on stuff.[00:18:28] swyx: And then obviously easy to spend, hard to use. You have to actually use. The good thing is that actually Google lets you do a lot of stuff for free now. So like deep research. That they just launched. Uses a ton of inference and it's, it's free while it's in preview.[00:18:45] Alessio: Yeah. They need to put that in Lindy.[00:18:47] Alessio: I've been using Lindy lately. I've been a built a bunch of things once we had flow because I liked the new thing. It's pretty good. I even did a phone call assistant. Um, yeah, they just launched Lindy voice. Yeah, I think once [00:19:00] they get advanced voice mode like capability today, still like speech to text, you can kind of tell.[00:19:06] Alessio: Um, but it's good for like reservations and things like that. So I have a meeting prepper thing. And so[00:19:13] swyx: it's good. Okay. I feel like we've, we've covered a lot of stuff. Uh, I, yeah, I, you know, I think We will go over the individual, uh, talks in a separate episode. Uh, I don't want to take too much time with, uh, this stuff, but that suffice to say that there is a lot of progress in each field.[00:19:28] swyx: Uh, we covered vision. Basically this is all like the audience voting for what they wanted. And then I just invited the best people I could find in each audience, especially agents. Um, Graham, who I talked to at ICML in Vienna, he is currently still number one. It's very hard to stay on top of SweetBench.[00:19:45] swyx: OpenHand is currently still number one. switchbench full, which is the hardest one. He had very good thoughts on agents, which I, which I'll highlight for people. Everyone is saying 2025 is the year of agents, just like they said last year. And, uh, but he had [00:20:00] thoughts on like eight parts of what are the frontier problems to solve in agents.[00:20:03] swyx: And so I'll highlight that talk as well.[00:20:05] Alessio: Yeah. The number six, which is the Hacken agents learn more about the environment, has been a Super interesting to us as well, just to think through, because, yeah, how do you put an agent in an enterprise where most things in an enterprise have never been public, you know, a lot of the tooling, like the code bases and things like that.[00:20:23] Alessio: So, yeah, there's not indexing and reg. Well, yeah, but it's more like. You can't really rag things that are not documented. But people know them based on how they've been doing it. You know, so I think there's almost this like, you know, Oh, institutional knowledge. Yeah, the boring word is kind of like a business process extraction.[00:20:38] Alessio: Yeah yeah, I see. It's like, how do you actually understand how these things are done? I see. Um, and I think today the, the problem is that, Yeah, the agents are, that most people are building are good at following instruction, but are not as good as like extracting them from you. Um, so I think that will be a big unlock just to touch quickly on the Jeff Dean thing.[00:20:55] Alessio: I thought it was pretty, I mean, we'll link it in the, in the things, but. I think the main [00:21:00] focus was like, how do you use ML to optimize the systems instead of just focusing on ML to do something else? Yeah, I think speculative decoding, we had, you know, Eugene from RWKB on the podcast before, like he's doing a lot of that with Fetterless AI.[00:21:12] swyx: Everyone is. I would say it's the norm. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with how much it costs, because it does use more of the GPU per call. But because everyone is so keen on fast inference, then yeah, makes sense.[00:21:24] Alessio: Exactly. Um, yeah, but we'll link that. Obviously Jeff is great.[00:21:30] swyx: Jeff is, Jeff's talk was more, it wasn't focused on Gemini.[00:21:33] swyx: I think people got the wrong impression from my tweet. It's more about how Google approaches ML and uses ML to design systems and then systems feedback into ML. And I think this ties in with Lubna's talk.[00:21:45] Synthetic Data and Future Trends[00:21:45] swyx: on synthetic data where it's basically the story of bootstrapping of humans and AI in AI research or AI in production.[00:21:53] swyx: So her talk was on synthetic data, where like how much synthetic data has grown in 2024 in the pre training side, the post training side, [00:22:00] and the eval side. And I think Jeff then also extended it basically to chips, uh, to chip design. So he'd spend a lot of time talking about alpha chip. And most of us in the audience are like, we're not working on hardware, man.[00:22:11] swyx: Like you guys are great. TPU is great. Okay. We'll buy TPUs.[00:22:14] Alessio: And then there was the earlier talk. Yeah. But, and then we have, uh, I don't know if we're calling them essays. What are we calling these? But[00:22:23] swyx: for me, it's just like bonus for late in space supporters, because I feel like they haven't been getting anything.[00:22:29] swyx: And then I wanted a more high frequency way to write stuff. Like that one I wrote in an afternoon. I think basically we now have an answer to what Ilya saw. It's one year since. The blip. And we know what he saw in 2014. We know what he saw in 2024. We think we know what he sees in 2024. He gave some hints and then we have vague indications of what he saw in 2023.[00:22:54] swyx: So that was the Oh, and then 2016 as well, because of this lawsuit with Elon, OpenAI [00:23:00] is publishing emails from Sam's, like, his personal text messages to Siobhan, Zelis, or whatever. So, like, we have emails from Ilya saying, this is what we're seeing in OpenAI, and this is why we need to scale up GPUs. And I think it's very prescient in 2016 to write that.[00:23:16] swyx: And so, like, it is exactly, like, basically his insights. It's him and Greg, basically just kind of driving the scaling up of OpenAI, while they're still playing Dota. They're like, no, like, we see the path here.[00:23:30] Alessio: Yeah, and it's funny, yeah, they even mention, you know, we can only train on 1v1 Dota. We need to train on 5v5, and that takes too many GPUs.[00:23:37] Alessio: Yeah,[00:23:37] swyx: and at least for me, I can speak for myself, like, I didn't see the path from Dota to where we are today. I think even, maybe if you ask them, like, they wouldn't necessarily draw a straight line. Yeah,[00:23:47] Alessio: no, definitely. But I think like that was like the whole idea of almost like the RL and we talked about this with Nathan on his podcast.[00:23:55] Alessio: It's like with RL, you can get very good at specific things, but then you can't really like generalize as much. And I [00:24:00] think the language models are like the opposite, which is like, you're going to throw all this data at them and scale them up, but then you really need to drive them home on a specific task later on.[00:24:08] Alessio: And we'll talk about the open AI reinforcement, fine tuning, um, announcement too, and all of that. But yeah, I think like scale is all you need. That's kind of what Elia will be remembered for. And I think just maybe to clarify on like the pre training is over thing that people love to tweet. I think the point of the talk was like everybody, we're scaling these chips, we're scaling the compute, but like the second ingredient which is data is not scaling at the same rate.[00:24:35] Alessio: So it's not necessarily pre training is over. It's kind of like What got us here won't get us there. In his email, he predicted like 10x growth every two years or something like that. And I think maybe now it's like, you know, you can 10x the chips again, but[00:24:49] swyx: I think it's 10x per year. Was it? I don't know.[00:24:52] Alessio: Exactly. And Moore's law is like 2x. So it's like, you know, much faster than that. And yeah, I like the fossil fuel of AI [00:25:00] analogy. It's kind of like, you know, the little background tokens thing. So the OpenAI reinforcement fine tuning is basically like, instead of fine tuning on data, you fine tune on a reward model.[00:25:09] Alessio: So it's basically like, instead of being data driven, it's like task driven. And I think people have tasks to do, they don't really have a lot of data. So I'm curious to see how that changes, how many people fine tune, because I think this is what people run into. It's like, Oh, you can fine tune llama. And it's like, okay, where do I get the data?[00:25:27] Alessio: To fine tune it on, you know, so it's great that we're moving the thing. And then I really like he had this chart where like, you know, the brain mass and the body mass thing is basically like mammals that scaled linearly by brain and body size, and then humans kind of like broke off the slope. So it's almost like maybe the mammal slope is like the pre training slope.[00:25:46] Alessio: And then the post training slope is like the, the human one.[00:25:49] swyx: Yeah. I wonder what the. I mean, we'll know in 10 years, but I wonder what the y axis is for, for Ilya's SSI. We'll try to get them on.[00:25:57] Alessio: Ilya, if you're listening, you're [00:26:00] welcome here. Yeah, and then he had, you know, what comes next, like agent, synthetic data, inference, compute, I thought all of that was like that.[00:26:05] Alessio: I don't[00:26:05] swyx: think he was dropping any alpha there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:26:07] Alessio: Yeah. Any other new reps? Highlights?[00:26:10] swyx: I think that there was comparatively a lot more work. Oh, by the way, I need to plug that, uh, my friend Yi made this, like, little nice paper. Yeah, that was really[00:26:20] swyx: nice.[00:26:20] swyx: Uh, of, uh, of, like, all the, he's, she called it must read papers of 2024.[00:26:26] swyx: So I laid out some of these at NeurIPS, and it was just gone. Like, everyone just picked it up. Because people are dying for, like, little guidance and visualizations And so, uh, I thought it was really super nice that we got there.[00:26:38] Alessio: Should we do a late in space book for each year? Uh, I thought about it. For each year we should.[00:26:42] Alessio: Coffee table book. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Put it in the will. Hi, Will. By the way, we haven't introduced you. He's our new, you know, general organist, Jamie. You need to[00:26:52] swyx: pull up more things. One thing I saw that, uh, Okay, one fun one, and then one [00:27:00] more general one. So the fun one is this paper on agent collusion. This is a paper on steganography.[00:27:06] swyx: This is secret collusion among AI agents, multi agent deception via steganography. I tried to go to NeurIPS in order to find these kinds of papers because the real reason Like NeurIPS this year has a lottery system. A lot of people actually even go and don't buy tickets because they just go and attend the side events.[00:27:22] swyx: And then also the people who go and end up crowding around the most popular papers, which you already know and already read them before you showed up to NeurIPS. So the only reason you go there is to talk to the paper authors, but there's like something like 10, 000 other. All these papers out there that, you know, are just people's work that they, that they did on the air and they failed to get attention for one reason or another.[00:27:42] swyx: And this was one of them. Uh, it was like all the way at the back. And this is a deep mind paper that actually focuses on collusion between AI agents, uh, by hiding messages in the text that they generate. Uh, so that's what steganography is. So a very simple example would be the first letter of every word.[00:27:57] swyx: If you Pick that out, you know, and the code sends a [00:28:00] different message than that. But something I've always emphasized is to LLMs, we read left to right. LLMs can read up, down, sideways, you know, in random character order. And it's the same to them as it is to us. So if we were ever to get You know, self motivated, underlined LLMs that we're trying to collaborate to take over the planet.[00:28:19] swyx: This would be how they do it. They spread messages among us in the messages that we generate. And he developed a scaling law for that. So he marked, I'm showing it on screen right now, the emergence of this phenomenon. Basically, for example, for Cypher encoding, GPT 2, Lama 2, mixed trial, GPT 3. 5, zero capabilities, and sudden 4.[00:28:40] swyx: And this is the kind of Jason Wei type emergence properties that people kind of look for. I think what made this paper stand out as well, so he developed the benchmark for steganography collusion, and he also focused on shelling point collusion, which is very low coordination. For agreeing on a decoding encoding format, you kind of need to have some [00:29:00] agreement on that.[00:29:00] swyx: But, but shelling point means like very, very low or almost no coordination. So for example, if I, if I ask someone, if the only message I give you is meet me in New York and you're not aware. Or when you would probably meet me at Grand Central Station. That is the Grand Central Station is a shelling point.[00:29:16] swyx: And it's probably somewhere, somewhere during the day. That is the shelling point of New York is Grand Central. To that extent, shelling points for steganography are things like the, the, the common decoding methods that we talked about. It will be interesting at some point in the future when we are worried about alignment.[00:29:30] swyx: It is not interesting today, but it's interesting that DeepMind is already thinking about this.[00:29:36] Alessio: I think that's like one of the hardest things about NeurIPS. It's like the long tail. I[00:29:41] swyx: found a pricing guy. I'm going to feature him on the podcast. Basically, this guy from NVIDIA worked out the optimal pricing for language models.[00:29:51] swyx: It's basically an econometrics paper at NeurIPS, where everyone else is talking about GPUs. And the guy with the GPUs is[00:29:57] Alessio: talking[00:29:57] swyx: about economics instead. [00:30:00] That was the sort of fun one. So the focus I saw is that model papers at NeurIPS are kind of dead. No one really presents models anymore. It's just data sets.[00:30:12] swyx: This is all the grad students are working on. So like there was a data sets track and then I was looking around like, I was like, you don't need a data sets track because every paper is a data sets paper. And so data sets and benchmarks, they're kind of flip sides of the same thing. So Yeah. Cool. Yeah, if you're a grad student, you're a GPU boy, you kind of work on that.[00:30:30] swyx: And then the, the sort of big model that people walk around and pick the ones that they like, and then they use it in their models. And that's, that's kind of how it develops. I, I feel like, um, like, like you didn't last year, you had people like Hao Tian who worked on Lava, which is take Lama and add Vision.[00:30:47] swyx: And then obviously actually I hired him and he added Vision to Grok. Now he's the Vision Grok guy. This year, I don't think there was any of those.[00:30:55] Alessio: What were the most popular, like, orals? Last year it was like the [00:31:00] Mixed Monarch, I think, was like the most attended. Yeah, uh, I need to look it up. Yeah, I mean, if nothing comes to mind, that's also kind of like an answer in a way.[00:31:10] Alessio: But I think last year there was a lot of interest in, like, furthering models and, like, different architectures and all of that.[00:31:16] swyx: I will say that I felt the orals, oral picks this year were not very good. Either that or maybe it's just a So that's the highlight of how I have changed in terms of how I view papers.[00:31:29] swyx: So like, in my estimation, two of the best papers in this year for datasets or data comp and refined web or fine web. These are two actually industrially used papers, not highlighted for a while. I think DCLM got the spotlight, FineWeb didn't even get the spotlight. So like, it's just that the picks were different.[00:31:48] swyx: But one thing that does get a lot of play that a lot of people are debating is the role that's scheduled. This is the schedule free optimizer paper from Meta from Aaron DeFazio. And this [00:32:00] year in the ML community, there's been a lot of chat about shampoo, soap, all the bathroom amenities for optimizing your learning rates.[00:32:08] swyx: And, uh, most people at the big labs are. Who I asked about this, um, say that it's cute, but it's not something that matters. I don't know, but it's something that was discussed and very, very popular. 4Wars[00:32:19] Alessio: of AI recap maybe, just quickly. Um, where do you want to start? Data?[00:32:26] swyx: So to remind people, this is the 4Wars piece that we did as one of our earlier recaps of this year.[00:32:31] swyx: And the belligerents are on the left, journalists, writers, artists, anyone who owns IP basically, New York Times, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Getty, Sarah Silverman, George RR Martin. Yeah, and I think this year we can add Scarlett Johansson to that side of the fence. So anyone suing, open the eye, basically. I actually wanted to get a snapshot of all the lawsuits.[00:32:52] swyx: I'm sure some lawyer can do it. That's the data quality war. On the right hand side, we have the synthetic data people, and I think we talked about Lumna's talk, you know, [00:33:00] really showing how much synthetic data has come along this year. I think there was a bit of a fight between scale. ai and the synthetic data community, because scale.[00:33:09] swyx: ai published a paper saying that synthetic data doesn't work. Surprise, surprise, scale. ai is the leading vendor of non synthetic data. Only[00:33:17] Alessio: cage free annotated data is useful.[00:33:21] swyx: So I think there's some debate going on there, but I don't think it's much debate anymore that at least synthetic data, for the reasons that are blessed in Luna's talk, Makes sense.[00:33:32] swyx: I don't know if you have any perspectives there.[00:33:34] Alessio: I think, again, going back to the reinforcement fine tuning, I think that will change a little bit how people think about it. I think today people mostly use synthetic data, yeah, for distillation and kind of like fine tuning a smaller model from like a larger model.[00:33:46] Alessio: I'm not super aware of how the frontier labs use it outside of like the rephrase, the web thing that Apple also did. But yeah, I think it'll be. Useful. I think like whether or not that gets us the big [00:34:00] next step, I think that's maybe like TBD, you know, I think people love talking about data because it's like a GPU poor, you know, I think, uh, synthetic data is like something that people can do, you know, so they feel more opinionated about it compared to, yeah, the optimizers stuff, which is like,[00:34:17] swyx: they don't[00:34:17] Alessio: really work[00:34:18] swyx: on.[00:34:18] swyx: I think that there is an angle to the reasoning synthetic data. So this year, we covered in the paper club, the star series of papers. So that's star, Q star, V star. It basically helps you to synthesize reasoning steps, or at least distill reasoning steps from a verifier. And if you look at the OpenAI RFT, API that they released, or that they announced, basically they're asking you to submit graders, or they choose from a preset list of graders.[00:34:49] swyx: Basically It feels like a way to create valid synthetic data for them to fine tune their reasoning paths on. Um, so I think that is another angle where it starts to make sense. And [00:35:00] so like, it's very funny that basically all the data quality wars between Let's say the music industry or like the newspaper publishing industry or the textbooks industry on the big labs.[00:35:11] swyx: It's all of the pre training era. And then like the new era, like the reasoning era, like nobody has any problem with all the reasoning, especially because it's all like sort of math and science oriented with, with very reasonable graders. I think the more interesting next step is how does it generalize beyond STEM?[00:35:27] swyx: We've been using O1 for And I would say like for summarization and creative writing and instruction following, I think it's underrated. I started using O1 in our intro songs before we killed the intro songs, but it's very good at writing lyrics. You know, I can actually say like, I think one of the O1 pro demos.[00:35:46] swyx: All of these things that Noam was showing was that, you know, you can write an entire paragraph or three paragraphs without using the letter A, right?[00:35:53] Creative Writing with AI[00:35:53] swyx: So like, like literally just anything instead of token, like not even token level, character level manipulation and [00:36:00] counting and instruction following. It's, uh, it's very, very strong.[00:36:02] swyx: And so no surprises when I ask it to rhyme, uh, and to, to create song lyrics, it's going to do that very much better than in previous models. So I think it's underrated for creative writing.[00:36:11] Alessio: Yeah.[00:36:12] Legal and Ethical Issues in AI[00:36:12] Alessio: What do you think is the rationale that they're going to have in court when they don't show you the thinking traces of O1, but then they want us to, like, they're getting sued for using other publishers data, you know, but then on their end, they're like, well, you shouldn't be using my data to then train your model.[00:36:29] Alessio: So I'm curious to see how that kind of comes. Yeah, I mean, OPA has[00:36:32] swyx: many ways to publish, to punish people without bringing, taking them to court. Already banned ByteDance for distilling their, their info. And so anyone caught distilling the chain of thought will be just disallowed to continue on, on, on the API.[00:36:44] swyx: And it's fine. It's no big deal. Like, I don't even think that's an issue at all, just because the chain of thoughts are pretty well hidden. Like you have to work very, very hard to, to get it to leak. And then even when it leaks the chain of thought, you don't know if it's, if it's [00:37:00] The bigger concern is actually that there's not that much IP hiding behind it, that Cosign, which we talked about, we talked to him on Dev Day, can just fine tune 4.[00:37:13] swyx: 0 to beat 0. 1 Cloud SONET so far is beating O1 on coding tasks without, at least O1 preview, without being a reasoning model, same for Gemini Pro or Gemini 2. 0. So like, how much is reasoning important? How much of a moat is there in this, like, All of these are proprietary sort of training data that they've presumably accomplished.[00:37:34] swyx: Because even DeepSeek was able to do it. And they had, you know, two months notice to do this, to do R1. So, it's actually unclear how much moat there is. Obviously, you know, if you talk to the Strawberry team, they'll be like, yeah, I mean, we spent the last two years doing this. So, we don't know. And it's going to be Interesting because there'll be a lot of noise from people who say they have inference time compute and actually don't because they just have fancy chain of thought.[00:38:00][00:38:00] swyx: And then there's other people who actually do have very good chain of thought. And you will not see them on the same level as OpenAI because OpenAI has invested a lot in building up the mythology of their team. Um, which makes sense. Like the real answer is somewhere in between.[00:38:13] Alessio: Yeah, I think that's kind of like the main data war story developing.[00:38:18] The Data War: GPU Poor vs. GPU Rich[00:38:18] Alessio: GPU poor versus GPU rich. Yeah. Where do you think we are? I think there was, again, going back to like the small model thing, there was like a time in which the GPU poor were kind of like the rebel faction working on like these models that were like open and small and cheap. And I think today people don't really care as much about GPUs anymore.[00:38:37] Alessio: You also see it in the price of the GPUs. Like, you know, that market is kind of like plummeted because there's people don't want to be, they want to be GPU free. They don't even want to be poor. They just want to be, you know, completely without them. Yeah. How do you think about this war? You[00:38:52] swyx: can tell me about this, but like, I feel like the, the appetite for GPU rich startups, like the, you know, the, the funding plan is we will raise 60 million and [00:39:00] we'll give 50 of that to NVIDIA.[00:39:01] swyx: That is gone, right? Like, no one's, no one's pitching that. This was literally the plan, the exact plan of like, I can name like four or five startups, you know, this time last year. So yeah, GPU rich startups gone.[00:39:12] The Rise of GPU Ultra Rich[00:39:12] swyx: But I think like, The GPU ultra rich, the GPU ultra high net worth is still going. So, um, now we're, you know, we had Leopold's essay on the trillion dollar cluster.[00:39:23] swyx: We're not quite there yet. We have multiple labs, um, you know, XAI very famously, you know, Jensen Huang praising them for being. Best boy number one in spinning up 100, 000 GPU cluster in like 12 days or something. So likewise at Meta, likewise at OpenAI, likewise at the other labs as well. So like the GPU ultra rich are going to keep doing that because I think partially it's an article of faith now that you just need it.[00:39:46] swyx: Like you don't even know what it's going to, what you're going to use it for. You just, you just need it. And it makes sense that if, especially if we're going into. More researchy territory than we are. So let's say 2020 to 2023 was [00:40:00] let's scale big models territory because we had GPT 3 in 2020 and we were like, okay, we'll go from 1.[00:40:05] swyx: 75b to 1. 8b, 1. 8t. And that was GPT 3 to GPT 4. Okay, that's done. As far as everyone is concerned, Opus 3. 5 is not coming out, GPT 4. 5 is not coming out, and Gemini 2, we don't have Pro, whatever. We've hit that wall. Maybe I'll call it the 2 trillion perimeter wall. We're not going to 10 trillion. No one thinks it's a good idea, at least from training costs, from the amount of data, or at least the inference.[00:40:36] swyx: Would you pay 10x the price of GPT Probably not. Like, like you want something else that, that is at least more useful. So it makes sense that people are pivoting in terms of their inference paradigm.[00:40:47] Emerging Trends in AI Models[00:40:47] swyx: And so when it's more researchy, then you actually need more just general purpose compute to mess around with, uh, at the exact same time that production deployments of the old, the previous paradigm is still ramping up,[00:40:58] swyx: um,[00:40:58] swyx: uh, pretty aggressively.[00:40:59] swyx: So [00:41:00] it makes sense that the GPU rich are growing. We have now interviewed both together and fireworks and replicates. Uh, we haven't done any scale yet. But I think Amazon, maybe kind of a sleeper one, Amazon, in a sense of like they, at reInvent, I wasn't expecting them to do so well, but they are now a foundation model lab.[00:41:18] swyx: It's kind of interesting. Um, I think, uh, you know, David went over there and started just creating models.[00:41:25] Alessio: Yeah, I mean, that's the power of prepaid contracts. I think like a lot of AWS customers, you know, they do this big reserve instance contracts and now they got to use their money. That's why so many startups.[00:41:37] Alessio: Get bought through the AWS marketplace so they can kind of bundle them together and prefer pricing.[00:41:42] swyx: Okay, so maybe GPU super rich doing very well, GPU middle class dead, and then GPU[00:41:48] Alessio: poor. I mean, my thing is like, everybody should just be GPU rich. There shouldn't really be, even the GPU poorest, it's like, does it really make sense to be GPU poor?[00:41:57] Alessio: Like, if you're GPU poor, you should just use the [00:42:00] cloud. Yes, you know, and I think there might be a future once we kind of like figure out what the size and shape of these models is where like the tiny box and these things come to fruition where like you can be GPU poor at home. But I think today is like, why are you working so hard to like get these models to run on like very small clusters where it's like, It's so cheap to run them.[00:42:21] Alessio: Yeah, yeah,[00:42:22] swyx: yeah. I think mostly people think it's cool. People think it's a stepping stone to scaling up. So they aspire to be GPU rich one day and they're working on new methods. Like news research, like probably the most deep tech thing they've done this year is Distro or whatever the new name is.[00:42:38] swyx: There's a lot of interest in heterogeneous computing, distributed computing. I tend generally to de emphasize that historically, but it may be coming to a time where it is starting to be relevant. I don't know. You know, SF compute launched their compute marketplace this year, and like, who's really using that?[00:42:53] swyx: Like, it's a bunch of small clusters, disparate types of compute, and if you can make that [00:43:00] useful, then that will be very beneficial to the broader community, but maybe still not the source of frontier models. It's just going to be a second tier of compute that is unlocked for people, and that's fine. But yeah, I mean, I think this year, I would say a lot more on device, We are, I now have Apple intelligence on my phone.[00:43:19] swyx: Doesn't do anything apart from summarize my notifications. But still, not bad. Like, it's multi modal.[00:43:25] Alessio: Yeah, the notification summaries are so and so in my experience.[00:43:29] swyx: Yeah, but they add, they add juice to life. And then, um, Chrome Nano, uh, Gemini Nano is coming out in Chrome. Uh, they're still feature flagged, but you can, you can try it now if you, if you use the, uh, the alpha.[00:43:40] swyx: And so, like, I, I think, like, you know, We're getting the sort of GPU poor version of a lot of these things coming out, and I think it's like quite useful. Like Windows as well, rolling out RWKB in sort of every Windows department is super cool. And I think the last thing that I never put in this GPU poor war, that I think I should now, [00:44:00] is the number of startups that are GPU poor but still scaling very well, as sort of wrappers on top of either a foundation model lab, or GPU Cloud.[00:44:10] swyx: GPU Cloud, it would be Suno. Suno, Ramp has rated as one of the top ranked, fastest growing startups of the year. Um, I think the last public number is like zero to 20 million this year in ARR and Suno runs on Moto. So Suno itself is not GPU rich, but they're just doing the training on, on Moto, uh, who we've also talked to on, on the podcast.[00:44:31] swyx: The other one would be Bolt, straight cloud wrapper. And, and, um, Again, another, now they've announced 20 million ARR, which is another step up from our 8 million that we put on the title. So yeah, I mean, it's crazy that all these GPU pores are finding a way while the GPU riches are also finding a way. And then the only failures, I kind of call this the GPU smiling curve, where the edges do well, because you're either close to the machines, and you're like [00:45:00] number one on the machines, or you're like close to the customers, and you're number one on the customer side.[00:45:03] swyx: And the people who are in the middle. Inflection, um, character, didn't do that great. I think character did the best of all of them. Like, you have a note in here that we apparently said that character's price tag was[00:45:15] Alessio: 1B.[00:45:15] swyx: Did I say that?[00:45:16] Alessio: Yeah. You said Google should just buy them for 1B. I thought it was a crazy number.[00:45:20] Alessio: Then they paid 2. 7 billion. I mean, for like,[00:45:22] swyx: yeah.[00:45:22] Alessio: What do you pay for node? Like, I don't know what the game world was like. Maybe the starting price was 1B. I mean, whatever it was, it worked out for everybody involved.[00:45:31] The Multi-Modality War[00:45:31] Alessio: Multimodality war. And this one, we never had text to video in the first version, which now is the hottest.[00:45:37] swyx: Yeah, I would say it's a subset of image, but yes.[00:45:40] Alessio: Yeah, well, but I think at the time it wasn't really something people were doing, and now we had VO2 just came out yesterday. Uh, Sora was released last month, last week. I've not tried Sora, because the day that I tried, it wasn't, yeah. I[00:45:54] swyx: think it's generally available now, you can go to Sora.[00:45:56] swyx: com and try it. Yeah, they had[00:45:58] Alessio: the outage. Which I [00:46:00] think also played a part into it. Small things. Yeah. What's the other model that you posted today that was on Replicate? Video or OneLive?[00:46:08] swyx: Yeah. Very, very nondescript name, but it is from Minimax, which I think is a Chinese lab. The Chinese labs do surprisingly well at the video models.[00:46:20] swyx: I'm not sure it's actually Chinese. I don't know. Hold me up to that. Yep. China. It's good. Yeah, the Chinese love video. What can I say? They have a lot of training data for video. Or a more relaxed regulatory environment.[00:46:37] Alessio: Uh, well, sure, in some way. Yeah, I don't think there's much else there. I think like, you know, on the image side, I think it's still open.[00:46:45] Alessio: Yeah, I mean,[00:46:46] swyx: 11labs is now a unicorn. So basically, what is multi modality war? Multi modality war is, do you specialize in a single modality, right? Or do you have GodModel that does all the modalities? So this is [00:47:00] definitely still going, in a sense of 11 labs, you know, now Unicorn, PicoLabs doing well, they launched Pico 2.[00:47:06] swyx: 0 recently, HeyGen, I think has reached 100 million ARR, Assembly, I don't know, but they have billboards all over the place, so I assume they're doing very, very well. So these are all specialist models, specialist models and specialist startups. And then there's the big labs who are doing the sort of all in one play.[00:47:24] swyx: And then here I would highlight Gemini 2 for having native image output. Have you seen the demos? Um, yeah, it's, it's hard to keep up. Literally they launched this last week and a shout out to Paige Bailey, who came to the Latent Space event to demo on the day of launch. And she wasn't prepared. She was just like, I'm just going to show you.[00:47:43] swyx: So they have voice. They have, you know, obviously image input, and then they obviously can code gen and all that. But the new one that OpenAI and Meta both have but they haven't launched yet is image output. So you can literally, um, I think their demo video was that you put in an image of a [00:48:00] car, and you ask for minor modifications to that car.[00:48:02] swyx: They can generate you that modification exactly as you asked. So there's no need for the stable diffusion or comfy UI workflow of like mask here and then like infill there in paint there and all that, all that stuff. This is small model nonsense. Big model people are like, huh, we got you in as everything in the transformer.[00:48:21] swyx: This is the multimodality war, which is, do you, do you bet on the God model or do you string together a whole bunch of, uh, Small models like a, like a chump. Yeah,[00:48:29] Alessio: I don't know, man. Yeah, that would be interesting. I mean, obviously I use Midjourney for all of our thumbnails. Um, they've been doing a ton on the product, I would say.[00:48:38] Alessio: They launched a new Midjourney editor thing. They've been doing a ton. Because I think, yeah, the motto is kind of like, Maybe, you know, people say black forest, the black forest models are better than mid journey on a pixel by pixel basis. But I think when you put it, put it together, have you tried[00:48:53] swyx: the same problems on black forest?[00:48:55] Alessio: Yes. But the problem is just like, you know, on black forest, it generates one image. And then it's like, you got to [00:49:00] regenerate. You don't have all these like UI things. Like what I do, no, but it's like time issue, you know, it's like a mid[00:49:06] swyx: journey. Call the API four times.[00:49:08] Alessio: No, but then there's no like variate.[00:49:10] Alessio: Like the good thing about mid journey is like, you just go in there and you're cooking. There's a lot of stuff that just makes it really easy. And I think people underestimate that. Like, it's not really a skill issue, because I'm paying mid journey, so it's a Black Forest skill issue, because I'm not paying them, you know?[00:49:24] Alessio: Yeah,[00:49:25] swyx: so, okay, so, uh, this is a UX thing, right? Like, you, you, you understand that, at least, we think that Black Forest should be able to do all that stuff. I will also shout out, ReCraft has come out, uh, on top of the image arena that, uh, artificial analysis has done, has apparently, uh, Flux's place. Is this still true?[00:49:41] swyx: So, Artificial Analysis is now a company. I highlighted them I think in one of the early AI Newses of the year. And they have launched a whole bunch of arenas. So, they're trying to take on LM Arena, Anastasios and crew. And they have an image arena. Oh yeah, Recraft v3 is now beating Flux 1. 1. Which is very surprising [00:50:00] because Flux And Black Forest Labs are the old stable diffusion crew who left stability after, um, the management issues.[00:50:06] swyx: So Recurve has come from nowhere to be the top image model. Uh, very, very strange. I would also highlight that Grok has now launched Aurora, which is, it's very interesting dynamics between Grok and Black Forest Labs because Grok's images were originally launched, uh, in partnership with Black Forest Labs as a, as a thin wrapper.[00:50:24] swyx: And then Grok was like, no, we'll make our own. And so they've made their own. I don't know, there are no APIs or benchmarks about it. They just announced it. So yeah, that's the multi modality war. I would say that so far, the small model, the dedicated model people are winning, because they are just focused on their tasks.[00:50:42] swyx: But the big model, People are always catching up. And the moment I saw the Gemini 2 demo of image editing, where I can put in an image and just request it and it does, that's how AI should work. Not like a whole bunch of complicated steps. So it really is something. And I think one frontier that we haven't [00:51:00] seen this year, like obviously video has done very well, and it will continue to grow.[00:51:03] swyx: You know, we only have Sora Turbo today, but at some point we'll get full Sora. Oh, at least the Hollywood Labs will get Fulsora. We haven't seen video to audio, or video synced to audio. And so the researchers that I talked to are already starting to talk about that as the next frontier. But there's still maybe like five more years of video left to actually be Soda.[00:51:23] swyx: I would say that Gemini's approach Compared to OpenAI, Gemini seems, or DeepMind's approach to video seems a lot more fully fledged than OpenAI. Because if you look at the ICML recap that I published that so far nobody has listened to, um, that people have listened to it. It's just a different, definitely different audience.[00:51:43] swyx: It's only seven hours long. Why are people not listening? It's like everything in Uh, so, so DeepMind has, is working on Genie. They also launched Genie 2 and VideoPoet. So, like, they have maybe four years advantage on world modeling that OpenAI does not have. Because OpenAI basically only started [00:52:00] Diffusion Transformers last year, you know, when they hired, uh, Bill Peebles.[00:52:03] swyx: So, DeepMind has, has a bit of advantage here, I would say, in, in, in showing, like, the reason that VO2, while one, They cherry pick their videos. So obviously it looks better than Sora, but the reason I would believe that VO2, uh, when it's fully launched will do very well is because they have all this background work in video that they've done for years.[00:52:22] swyx: Like, like last year's NeurIPS, I already was interviewing some of their video people. I forget their model name, but for, for people who are dedicated fans, they can go to NeurIPS 2023 and see, see that paper.[00:52:32] Alessio: And then last but not least, the LLMOS. We renamed it to Ragops, formerly known as[00:52:39] swyx: Ragops War. I put the latest chart on the Braintrust episode.[00:52:43] swyx: I think I'm going to separate these essays from the episode notes. So the reason I used to do that, by the way, is because I wanted to show up on Hacker News. I wanted the podcast to show up on Hacker News. So I always put an essay inside of there because Hacker News people like to read and not listen.[00:52:58] Alessio: So episode essays,[00:52:59] swyx: I remember [00:53:00] purchasing them separately. You say Lanchain Llama Index is still growing.[00:53:03] Alessio: Yeah, so I looked at the PyPy stats, you know. I don't care about stars. On PyPy you see Do you want to share your screen? Yes. I prefer to look at actual downloads, not at stars on GitHub. So if you look at, you know, Lanchain still growing.[00:53:20] Alessio: These are the last six months. Llama Index still growing. What I've basically seen is like things that, One, obviously these things have A commercial product. So there's like people buying this and sticking with it versus kind of hopping in between things versus, you know, for example, crew AI, not really growing as much.[00:53:38] Alessio: The stars are growing. If you look on GitHub, like the stars are growing, but kind of like the usage is kind of like flat. In the last six months, have they done some[00:53:4

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all all our LS supporters who helped fund the gorgeous venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.Our next keynote covers The State of LLM Agents, with the triumphant return of Professor Graham Neubig's return to the pod (his ICLR episode here!). OpenDevin is now a startup known as AllHands! The renamed OpenHands has done extremely well this year, as they end the year sitting comfortably at number 1 on the hardest SWE-Bench Full leaderboard at 29%, though on the smaller SWE-Bench Verified, they are at 53%, behind Amazon Q, devlo, and OpenAI's self reported o3 results at 71.7%.Many are saying that 2025 is going to be the year of agents, with OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic setting their sights on consumer and coding agents, vision based computer-using agents and multi agent systems. There has been so much progress on the practical reliability and applications of agents in all domains, from the huge launch of Cognition AI's Devin this year, to the sleeper hit of Cursor Composer and Codeium's Windsurf Cascade in the IDE arena, to the explosive revenue growth of Stackblitz's Bolt, Lovable, and Vercel's v0, and the unicorn rounds and high profile movements of customer support agents like Sierra (now worth $4 billion) and search agents like Perplexity (now worth $9 billion). We wanted to take a little step back to understand the most notable papers of the year in Agents, and Graham indulged with his list of 8 perennial problems in building agents in 2024.Must-Read Papers for the 8 Problems of Agents* The agent-computer interface: CodeAct: Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents. Minimial viable tools: Execution Sandbox, File Editor, Web Browsing* The human-agent interface: Chat UI, GitHub Plugin, Remote runtime, …?* Choosing an LLM: See Evaluation of LLMs as Coding Agents on SWE-Bench at 30x - must understand instructions, tools, code, environment, error recovery* Planning: Single Agent Systems vs Multi Agent (CoAct: A Global-Local Hierarchy for Autonomous Agent Collaboration) - Explicit vs Implicit, Curated vs Generated* Reusable common workflows: SteP: Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actions and Agent Workflow Memory - Manual prompting vs Learning from Experience* Exploration: Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents and BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language* Search: Tree Search for Language Model Agents - explore paths and rewind* Evaluation: Fast Sanity Checks (miniWoB and Aider) and Highly Realistic (WebArena, SWE-Bench) and SWE-Gym: An Open Environment for Training Software Engineering Agents & VerifiersFull Talk on YouTubePlease like and subscribe!Timestamps* 00:00 Welcome to Latent Space Live at NeurIPS 2024* 00:29 State of LLM Agents in 2024* 02:20 Professor Graham Newbig's Insights on Agents* 03:57 Live Demo: Coding Agents in Action* 08:20 Designing Effective Agents* 14:13 Choosing the Right Language Model for Agents* 16:24 Planning and Workflow for Agents* 22:21 Evaluation and Future Predictions for Agents* 25:31 Future of Agent Development* 25:56 Human-Agent Interaction Challenges* 26:48 Expanding Agent Use Beyond Programming* 27:25 Redesigning Systems for Agent Efficiency* 28:03 Accelerating Progress with Agent Technology* 28:28 Call to Action for Open Source Contributions* 30:36 Q&A: Agent Performance and Benchmarks* 33:23 Q&A: Web Agents and Interaction Methods* 37:16 Q&A: Agent Architectures and Improvements* 43:09 Q&A: Self-Improving Agents and Authentication* 47:31 Live Demonstration and Closing RemarksTranscript[00:00:29] State of LLM Agents in 2024[00:00:29] Speaker 9: Our next keynote covers the state of LLM agents. With the triumphant return of Professor Graham Newbig of CMU and OpenDevon, now a startup known as AllHands. The renamed OpenHands has done extremely well this year, as they end the year sitting comfortably at number one on the hardest SWE Benchful leaderboard at 29%.[00:00:53] Speaker 9: Though, on the smaller SWE bench verified, they are at 53 percent behind Amazon Q [00:01:00] Devlo and OpenAI's self reported O3 results at 71. 7%. Many are saying that 2025 is going to be the year of agents, with OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic setting their sights on consumer and coding agents. Vision based computer using agents and multi agent systems.[00:01:22] Speaker 9: There has been so much progress on the practical reliability and applications of agents in all domains, from the huge launch of Cognition AI's Devon this year, to the sleeper hit of Cursor Composer and recent guest Codium's Windsurf Cascade in the IDE arena. To the explosive revenue growth of recent guests StackBlitz's Bolt, Lovable, and Vercel's vZero.[00:01:44] Speaker 9: And the unicorn rounds and high profile movements of customer support agents like Sierra, now worth 4 billion, and search agents like Perplexity, now worth 9 billion. We wanted to take a little step back to understand the most notable papers of the year in [00:02:00] agents, and Graham indulged with his list of eight perennial problems in building agents.[00:02:06] Speaker 9: As always, don't forget to check our show notes for all the selected best papers of 2024, and for the YouTube link to their talk. Graham's slides were especially popular online, and we are honoured to have him. Watch out and take care![00:02:20] Professor Graham Newbig's Insights on Agents[00:02:20] Speaker: Okay hi everyone. So I was given the task of talking about agents in 2024, and this is An impossible task because there are so many agents, so many agents in 2024. So this is going to be strongly covered by like my personal experience and what I think is interesting and important, but I think it's an important topic.[00:02:41] Speaker: So let's go ahead. So the first thing I'd like to think about is let's say I gave you you know, a highly competent human, some tools. Let's say I gave you a web browser and a terminal or a file system. And the ability to [00:03:00] edit text or code. What could you do with that? Everything. Yeah.[00:03:07] Speaker: Probably a lot of things. This is like 99 percent of my, you know, daily daily life, I guess. When I'm, when I'm working. So, I think this is a pretty powerful tool set, and I am trying to do, and what I think some other people are trying to do, is come up with agents that are able to, you know, manipulate these things.[00:03:26] Speaker: Web browsing, coding, running code in successful ways. So there was a little bit about my profile. I'm a professor at CMU, chief scientist at All Hands AI, building open source coding agents. I'm maintainer of OpenHands, which is an open source coding agent framework. And I'm also a software developer and I, I like doing lots of coding and, and, you know, shipping new features and stuff like this.[00:03:51] Speaker: So building agents that help me to do this, you know, is kind of an interesting thing, very close to me.[00:03:57] Live Demo: Coding Agents in Action[00:03:57] Speaker: So the first thing I'd like to do is I'd like to try [00:04:00] some things that I haven't actually tried before. If anybody has, you know, tried to give a live demo, you know, this is, you know very, very scary whenever you do it and it might not work.[00:04:09] Speaker: So it might not work this time either. But I want to show you like three things that I typically do with coding agents in my everyday work. I use coding agents maybe five to 10 times a day to help me solve my own problems. And so this is a first one. This is a data science task. Which says I want to create scatter plots that show the increase of the SWE bench score over time.[00:04:34] Speaker: And so I, I wrote a kind of concrete prompt about this. Agents work better with like somewhat concrete prompts. And I'm gonna throw this into open hands and let it work. And I'll, I'll go back to that in a second. Another thing that I do is I create new software. And I, I've been using a [00:05:00] service a particular service.[00:05:01] Speaker: I won't name it for sending emails and I'm not very happy with it. So I want to switch over to this new service called resend. com, which makes it easier to send emails. And so I'm going to ask it to read the docs for the resend. com API and come up with a script that allows me to send emails. The input to the script should be a CSV file and the subject and body should be provided in Jinja2 templates.[00:05:24] Speaker: So I'll start another agent and and try to get it to do that for me.[00:05:35] Speaker: And let's go with the last one. The last one I do is. This is improving existing software and in order, you know, once you write software, you usually don't throw it away. You go in and, like, actually improve it iteratively. This software that I have is something I created without writing any code.[00:05:52] Speaker: It's basically software to monitor how much our our agents are contributing to the OpenHance repository. [00:06:00] And on the, let me make that a little bit bigger, on the left side, I have the number of issues where it like sent a pull request. I have the number of issues where it like sent a pull request, whether it was merged in purple, closed in red, or is still open in green. And so these are like, you know, it's helping us monitor, but one thing it doesn't tell me is the total number. And I kind of want that feature added to this software.[00:06:33] Speaker: So I'm going to try to add that too. So. I'll take this, I'll take this prompt,[00:06:46] Speaker: and here I want to open up specifically that GitHub repo. So I'll open up that repo and paste in the prompt asking it. I asked it to make a pie chart for each of these and give me the total over the entire time period that I'm [00:07:00] monitoring. So we'll do that. And so now I have let's see, I have some agents.[00:07:05] Speaker: Oh, this one already finished. Let's see. So this one already finished. You can see it finished analyzing the Swebench repository. It wrote a demonstration of, yeah, I'm trying to do that now, actually.[00:07:30] Speaker: It wrote a demonstration of how much each of the systems have improved over time. And I asked it to label the top three for each of the data sets. And so it labeled OpenHands as being the best one for SWE Bench Normal. For SWE Bench Verified, it has like the Amazon QAgent and OpenHands. For the SWE Bench Lite, it has three here over three over here.[00:07:53] Speaker: So you can see like. That's pretty useful, right? If you're a researcher, you do data analysis all the time. I did it while I was talking to all [00:08:00] of you and making a presentation. So that's, that's pretty nice. I, I doubt the other two are finished yet. That would be impressive if the, yeah. So I think they're still working.[00:08:09] Speaker: So maybe we'll get back to them at the end of the presentation. But so these are the kinds of the, these are the kinds of things that I do every day with coding agents now. And it's or software development agents. It's pretty impressive.[00:08:20] Designing Effective Agents[00:08:20] Speaker: The next thing I'd like to talk about a little bit is things I worry about when designing agents.[00:08:24] Speaker: So we're designing agents to, you know, do a very difficult task of like navigating websites writing code, other things like this. And within 2024, there's been like a huge improvement in the methodology that we use to do this. But there's a bunch of things we think about. There's a bunch of interesting papers, and I'd like to introduce a few of them.[00:08:46] Speaker: So the first thing I worry about is the agent computer interface. Like, how do we get an agent to interact with computers? And, How do we provide agents with the tools to do the job? And [00:09:00] within OpenHands we are doing the thing on the right, but there's also a lot of agents that do the thing on the left.[00:09:05] Speaker: So the thing on the left is you give like agents kind of granular tools. You give them tools like or let's say your instruction is I want to determine the most cost effective country to purchase the smartphone model, Kodak one the countries to consider are the USA, Japan, Germany, and India. And you have a bunch of available APIs.[00:09:26] Speaker: And. So what you do for some agents is you provide them all of these tools APIs as tools that they can call. And so in this particular case in order to solve this problem, you'd have to make about like 30 tool calls, right? You'd have to call lookup rates for Germany, you'd have to look it up for the US, Japan, and India.[00:09:44] Speaker: That's four tool goals. And then you go through and do all of these things separately. And the method that we adopt in OpenHands instead is we provide these tools, but we provide them by just giving a coding agent, the ability to call [00:10:00] arbitrary Python code. And. In the arbitrary Python code, it can call these tools.[00:10:05] Speaker: We expose these tools as APIs that the model can call. And what that allows us to do is instead of writing 20 tool calls, making 20 LLM calls, you write a program that runs all of these all at once, and it gets the result. And of course it can execute that program. It can, you know, make a mistake. It can get errors back and fix things.[00:10:23] Speaker: But that makes our job a lot easier. And this has been really like instrumental to our success, I think. Another part of this is what tools does the agent need? And I, I think this depends on your use case, we're kind of extreme and we're only giving the agent five tools or maybe six tools.[00:10:40] Speaker: And what, what are they? The first one is program execution. So it can execute bash programs, and it can execute Jupyter notebooks. It can execute cells in Jupyter notebooks. So that, those are two tools. Another one is a file editing tool. And the file editing tool allows you to browse parts of files.[00:11:00][00:11:00] Speaker: And kind of read them, overwrite them, other stuff like this. And then we have another global search and replace tool. So it's actually two tools for file editing. And then a final one is web browsing, web browsing. I'm kind of cheating when I call it only one tool. You actually have like scroll and text input and click and other stuff like that.[00:11:18] Speaker: But these are basically the only things we allow the agent to do. What, then the question is, like, what if we wanted to allow it to do something else? And the answer is, well, you know, human programmers already have a bunch of things that they use. They have the requests PyPy library, they have the PDF to text PyPy library, they have, like, all these other libraries in the Python ecosystem that they could use.[00:11:41] Speaker: And so if we provide a coding agent with all these libraries, it can do things like data visualization and other stuff that I just showed you. So it can also get clone repositories and, and other things like this. The agents are super good at using the GitHub API also. So they can do, you know, things on GitHub, like finding all of the, you know, [00:12:00] comments on your issues or checking GitHub actions and stuff.[00:12:02] Speaker: The second thing I think about is the human agent interface. So this is like how do we get humans to interact with agents? Bye. I already showed you one variety of our human agent interface. It's basically a chat window where you can browse through the agent's results and things like this. This is very, very difficult.[00:12:18] Speaker: I, I don't think anybody has a good answer to this, and I don't think we have a good answer to this, but the, the guiding principles that I'm trying to follow are we want to present enough info to the user. So we want to present them with, you know, what the agent is doing in the form of a kind of.[00:12:36] Speaker: English descriptions. So you can see here you can see here every time it takes an action, it says like, I will help you create a script for sending emails. When it runs a bash command. Sorry, that's a little small. When it runs a bash command, it will say ran a bash command. It won't actually show you the whole bash command or the whole Jupyter notebook because it can be really large, but you can open it up and see if you [00:13:00] want to, by clicking on this.[00:13:01] Speaker: So like if you want to explore more, you can click over to the Jupyter notebook and see what's displayed in the Jupyter notebook. And you get like lots and lots of information. So that's one thing.[00:13:16] Speaker: Another thing is go where the user is. So like if the user's already interacting in a particular setting then I'd like to, you know, integrate into that setting, but only to a point. So at OpenHands, we have a chat UI for interaction. We have a GitHub plugin for tagging and resolving issues. So basically what you do is you Do at open hands agent and the open hands agent will like see that comment and be able to go in and fix things.[00:13:42] Speaker: So if you say at open hands agent tests are failing on this PR, please fix the tests. It will go in and fix the test for you and stuff like this. Another thing we have is a remote runtime for launching headless jobs. So if you want to launch like a fleet of agents to solve, you know five different problems at once, you can also do [00:14:00] that through an API.[00:14:00] Speaker: So we have we have these interfaces and this probably depends on the use case. So like, depending if you're a coding agent, you want to do things one way. If you're a like insurance auditing agent, you'll want to do things other ways, obviously.[00:14:13] Choosing the Right Language Model for Agents[00:14:13] Speaker: Another thing I think about a lot is choosing a language model.[00:14:16] Speaker: And for agentic LMs we have to have a bunch of things work really well. The first thing is really, really good instruction following ability. And if you have really good instruction following ability, it opens up like a ton of possible applications for you. Tool use and coding ability. So if you provide tools, it needs to be able to use them well.[00:14:38] Speaker: Environment understanding. So it needs, like, if you're building a web agent, it needs to be able to understand web pages either through vision or through text. And error awareness and recovery ability. So, if it makes a mistake, it needs to be able to, you know, figure out why it made a mistake, come up with alternative strategies, and other things like this.[00:14:58] Speaker: [00:15:00] Under the hood, in all of the demos that I did now Cloud, we're using Cloud. Cloud has all of these abilities very good, not perfect, but very good. Most others don't have these abilities quite as much. So like GPT 4. 0 doesn't have very good error recovery ability. And so because of this, it will go into loops and do the same thing over and over and over again.[00:15:22] Speaker: Whereas Claude does not do this. Claude, if you, if you use the agents enough, you get used to their kind of like personality. And Claude says, Hmm, let me try a different approach a lot. So, you know, obviously it's been trained in some way to, you know, elicit this ability. We did an evaluation. This is old.[00:15:40] Speaker: And we need to update this basically, but we evaluated CLOD, mini LLAMA 405B, DeepSeq 2. 5 on being a good code agent within our framework. And CLOD was kind of head and shoulders above the rest. GPT 40 was kind of okay. The best open source model was LLAMA [00:16:00] 3. 1 405B. This needs to be updated because this is like a few months old by now and, you know, things are moving really, really fast.[00:16:05] Speaker: But I still am under the impression that Claude is the best. The other closed models are, you know, not quite as good. And then the open models are a little bit behind that. Grok, I, we haven't tried Grok at all, actually. So, it's a good question. If you want to try it I'd be happy to help.[00:16:24] Speaker: Cool.[00:16:24] Planning and Workflow for Agents[00:16:24] Speaker: Another thing is planning. And so there's a few considerations for planning. The first one is whether you have a curated plan or you have it generated on the fly. And so for solving GitHub issues, you can kind of have an overall plan. Like the plan is first reproduce. If there's an issue, first write tests to reproduce the issue or to demonstrate the issue.[00:16:50] Speaker: After that, run the tests and make sure they fail. Then go in and fix the tests. Run the tests again to make sure they pass and then you're done. So that's like a pretty good workflow [00:17:00] for like solving coding issues. And you could curate that ahead of time. Another option is to let the language model basically generate its own plan.[00:17:10] Speaker: And both of these are perfectly valid. Another one is explicit structure versus implicit structure. So let's say you generate a plan. If you have explicit structure, you could like write a multi agent system, and the multi agent system would have your reproducer agent, and then it would have your your bug your test writer agent, and your bug fixer agent, and lots of different agents, and you would explicitly write this all out in code, and then then use it that way.[00:17:38] Speaker: On the other hand, you could just provide a prompt that says, please do all of these things in order. So in OpenHands, we do very light planning. We have a single prompt. We don't have any multi agent systems. But we do provide, like, instructions about, like, what to do first, what to do next, and other things like this.[00:17:56] Speaker: I'm not against doing it the other way. But I laid [00:18:00] out some kind of justification for this in this blog called Don't Sleep on Single Agent Systems. And the basic idea behind this is if you have a really, really good instruction following agent it will follow the instructions as long as things are working according to your plan.[00:18:14] Speaker: But let's say you need to deviate from your plan, you still have the flexibility to do this. And if you do explicit structure through a multi agent system, it becomes a lot harder to do that. Like, you get stuck when things deviate from your plan. There's also some other examples, and I wanted to introduce a few papers.[00:18:30] Speaker: So one paper I liked recently is this paper called CoAct where you generate plans and then go in and fix them. And so the basic idea is like, if you need to deviate from your plan, you can You know, figure out that your plan was not working and go back and deviate from it.[00:18:49] Speaker: Another thing I think about a lot is specifying common workflows. So we're trying to tackle a software development and I already showed like three use cases where we do [00:19:00] software development and when we. We do software development, we do a ton of different things, but we do them over and over and over again.[00:19:08] Speaker: So just to give an example we fix GitHub actions when GitHub actions are failing. And we do that over and over and over again. That's not the number one thing that software engineers do, but it's a, you know, high up on the list. So how can we get a list of all of, like, the workflows that people are working on?[00:19:26] Speaker: And there's a few research works that people have done in this direction. One example is manual prompting. So there's this nice paper called STEP that got state of the art on the WebArena Web Navigation Benchmark where they came up with a bunch of manual workflows for solving different web navigation tasks.[00:19:43] Speaker: And we also have a paper recently called Agent Workflow Memory where the basic idea behind this is we want to create self improving agents that learn from their past successes. And the way it works is is we have a memory that has an example of lots of the previous [00:20:00] workflows that people have used. And every time the agent finishes a task and it self judges that it did a good job at that task, you take that task, you break it down into individual workflows included in that, and then you put it back in the prompt for the agent to work next time.[00:20:16] Speaker: And this we demonstrated that this leads to a 22. 5 percent increase on WebArena after 40 examples. So that's a pretty, you know, huge increase by kind of self learning and self improvement.[00:20:31] Speaker: Another thing is exploration. Oops. And one thing I think about is like, how can agents learn more about their environment before acting? And I work on coding and web agents, and there's, you know, a few good examples of this in, in both areas. Within coding, I view this as like repository understanding, understanding the code base that you're dealing with.[00:20:55] Speaker: And there's an example of this, or a couple examples of this, one example being AgentList. [00:21:00] Where they basically create a map of the repo and based on the map of the repo, they feed that into the agent so the agent can then navigate the repo and and better know where things are. And for web agents there's an example of a paper called Bagel, and basically what they do is they have the agent just do random tasks on a website, explore the website, better understand the structure of the website, and then after that they they feed that in as part of the product.[00:21:27] Speaker: Part seven is search. Right now in open hands, we just let the agent go on a linear search path. So it's just solving the problem once. We're using a good agent that can kind of like recover from errors and try alternative things when things are not working properly, but still we only have a linear search path.[00:21:45] Speaker: But there's also some nice work in 2024 that is about exploring multiple paths. So one example of this is there's a paper called Tree Search for Language Agents. And they basically expand multiple paths check whether the paths are going well, [00:22:00] and if they aren't going well, you rewind back. And on the web, this is kind of tricky, because, like, how do you rewind when you accidentally ordered something you don't want on Amazon?[00:22:09] Speaker: It's kind of, you know, not, not the easiest thing to do. For code, it's a little bit easier, because you can just revert any changes that you made. But I, I think that's an interesting topic, too.[00:22:21] Evaluation and Future Predictions for Agents[00:22:21] Speaker: And then finally evaluation. So within our development for evaluation, we want to do a number of things. The first one is fast sanity checks.[00:22:30] Speaker: And in order to do this, we want things we can run really fast, really really cheaply. So for web, we have something called mini world of bits, which is basically these trivial kind of web navigation things. We have something called the Adder Code Editing Benchmark, where it's just about editing individual files that we use.[00:22:48] Speaker: But we also want highly realistic evaluation. So for the web, we have something called WebArena that we created at CMU. This is web navigation on real real open source websites. So it's open source [00:23:00] websites that are actually used to serve shops or like bulletin boards or other things like this.[00:23:07] Speaker: And for code, we use Swebench, which I think a lot of people may have heard of. It's basically a coding benchmark that comes from real world pull requests on GitHub. So if you can solve those, you can also probably solve other real world pull requests. I would say we still don't have benchmarks for the fur full versatility of agents.[00:23:25] Speaker: So, for example We don't have benchmarks that test whether agents can code and do web navigation. But we're working on that and hoping to release something in the next week or two. So if that sounds interesting to you, come talk to me and I, I will tell you more about it.[00:23:42] Speaker: Cool. So I don't like making predictions, but I was told that I should be somewhat controversial, I guess, so I will, I will try to do it try to do it anyway, although maybe none of these will be very controversial. Um, the first thing is agent oriented LLMs like large language models for [00:24:00] agents.[00:24:00] Speaker: My, my prediction is every large LM trainer will be focusing on training models as agents. So every large language model will be a better agent model by mid 2025. Competition will increase, prices will go down, smaller models will become competitive as agents. So right now, actually agents are somewhat expensive to run in some cases, but I expect that that won't last six months.[00:24:23] Speaker: I, I bet we'll have much better agent models in six months. Another thing is instruction following ability, specifically in agentic contexts, will increase. And what that means is we'll have to do less manual engineering of agentic workflows and be able to do more by just prompting agents in more complex ways.[00:24:44] Speaker: Cloud is already really good at this. It's not perfect, but it's already really, really good. And I expect the other models will catch up to Cloud pretty soon. Error correction ability will increase, less getting stuck in loops. Again, this is something that Cloud's already pretty good at and I expect the others will, will follow.[00:25:00][00:25:01] Speaker: Agent benchmarks. Agent benchmarks will start saturating.[00:25:05] Speaker: And Swebench I think WebArena is already too easy. It, it is, it's not super easy, but it's already a bit too easy because the tasks we do in there are ones that take like two minutes for a human. So not, not too hard. And kind of historically in 2023 our benchmarks were too easy. So we built harder benchmarks like WebArena and Swebench were both built in 2023.[00:25:31] Future of Agent Development[00:25:31] Speaker: In 2024, our agents were too bad, so we built agents and now we're building better agents. In 2025, our benchmarks will be too easy, so we'll build better benchmarks, I'm, I'm guessing. So, I would expect to see much more challenging agent benchmarks come out, and we're already seeing some of them.[00:25:49] Speaker: In 2026, I don't know. I didn't write AGI, but we'll, we'll, we'll see.[00:25:56] Human-Agent Interaction Challenges[00:25:56] Speaker: Then the human agent computer interface. I think one thing that [00:26:00] we'll want to think about is what do we do at 75 percent success rate at things that we like actually care about? Right now we have 53 percent or 55 percent on Swebench verified, which is real world GitHub PRs.[00:26:16] Speaker: My impression is that the actual. Actual ability of models is maybe closer to 30 to 40%. So 30 to 40 percent of the things that I want an agent to solve on my own repos, it just solves without any human intervention. 80 to 90 percent it can solve without me opening an IDE. But I need to give it feedback.[00:26:36] Speaker: So how do we, how do we make that interaction smooth so that humans can audit? The work of agents that are really, really good, but not perfect is going to be a big challenge.[00:26:48] Expanding Agent Use Beyond Programming[00:26:48] Speaker: How can we expose the power of programming agents to other industries? So like as programmers, I think not all of us are using agents every day in our programming, although we probably will be [00:27:00] in in months or maybe a year.[00:27:02] Speaker: But I, I think it will come very naturally to us as programmers because we know code. We know, you know. Like how to architect software and stuff like that. So I think the question is how do we put this in the hands of like a lawyer or a chemist or somebody else and have them also be able to, you know, interact with it as naturally as we can.[00:27:25] Redesigning Systems for Agent Efficiency[00:27:25] Speaker: Another interesting thing is how can we redesign our existing systems for agents? So we had a paper on API based web agents, and basically what we showed is If you take a web agent and the agent interacts not with a website, but with APIs, the accuracy goes way up just because APIs are way easier to interact with.[00:27:42] Speaker: And in fact, like when I ask the, well, our agent, our agent is able to browse websites, but whenever I want it to interact with GitHub, I tell it do not browse the GitHub website. Use the GitHub API because it's way more successful at doing that. So maybe, you know, every website is going to need to have [00:28:00] an API because we're going to be having agents interact with them.[00:28:03] Accelerating Progress with Agent Technology[00:28:03] Speaker: About progress, I think progress will get faster. It's already fast. A lot of people are already overwhelmed, but I think it will continue. The reason why is agents are building agents. And better agents will build better agents faster. So I expect that you know, if you haven't interacted with a coding agent yet, it's pretty magical, like the stuff that it can do.[00:28:24] Speaker: So yeah.[00:28:28] Call to Action for Open Source Contributions[00:28:28] Speaker: And I have a call to action. I'm honestly, like I've been working on, you know, natural language processing and, and Language models for what, 15 years now. And even for me, it's pretty impressive what like AI agents powered by strong language models can do. On the other hand, I believe that we should really make these powerful tools accessible.[00:28:49] Speaker: And what I mean by this is I don't think like, you know, We, we should have these be opaque or limited to only a set, a certain set of people. I feel like they should be [00:29:00] affordable. They shouldn't be increasing the, you know, difference in the amount of power that people have. If anything, I'd really like them to kind of make it It's possible for people who weren't able to do things before to be able to do them well.[00:29:13] Speaker: Open source is one way to do that. That's why I'm working on open source. There are other ways to do that. You know, make things cheap, make things you know, so you can serve them to people who aren't able to afford them. Easily, like Duolingo is one example where they get all the people in the US to pay them 20 a month so that they can give all the people in South America free, you know, language education, so they can learn English and become, you know like, and become, you know, More attractive on the job market, for instance.[00:29:41] Speaker: And so I think we can all think of ways that we can do that sort of thing. And if that resonates with you, please contribute. Of course, I'd be happy if you contribute to OpenHands and use it. But another way you can do that is just use open source solutions, contribute to them, research with them, and train strong open source [00:30:00] models.[00:30:00] Speaker: So I see, you know, Some people in the room who are already training models. It'd be great if you could train models for coding agents and make them cheap. And yeah yeah, please. I, I was thinking about you among others. So yeah, that's all I have. Thanks.[00:30:20] Speaker 2: Slight, slightly controversial. Tick is probably the nicest way to say hot ticks. Any hot ticks questions, actual hot ticks?[00:30:31] Speaker: Oh, I can also show the other agents that were working, if anybody's interested, but yeah, sorry, go ahead.[00:30:36] Q&A: Agent Performance and Benchmarks[00:30:36] Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a couple of questions. So they're kind of paired, maybe. The first thing is that you said that You're estimating that your your agent is successfully resolving like something like 30 to 40 percent of your issues, but that's like below what you saw in Swebench.[00:30:52] Speaker 3: So I guess I'm wondering where that discrepancy is coming from. And then I guess my other second question, which is maybe broader in scope is that [00:31:00] like, if, if you think of an agent as like a junior developer, and I say, go do something, then I expect maybe tomorrow to get a Slack message being like, Hey, I ran into this issue.[00:31:10] Speaker 3: How can I resolve it? And, and, like you said, your agent is, like, successfully solving, like, 90 percent of issues where you give it direct feedback. So, are you thinking about how to get the agent to reach out to, like, for, for planning when it's, when it's stuck or something like that? Or, like, identify when it runs into a hole like that?[00:31:30] Speaker: Yeah, so great. These are great questions. Oh,[00:31:32] Speaker 3: sorry. The third question, which is a good, so this is the first two. And if so, are you going to add a benchmark for that second question?[00:31:40] Speaker: Okay. Great. Yeah. Great questions. Okay. So the first question was why do I think it's resolving less than 50 percent of the issues on Swebench?[00:31:48] Speaker: So first Swebench is on popular open source repos, and all of these popular open source repos were included in the training data for all of the language models. And so the language [00:32:00] models already know these repos. In some cases, the language models already know the individual issues in Swebench.[00:32:06] Speaker: So basically, like, some of the training data has leaked. And so it, it definitely will overestimate with respect to that. I don't think it's like, you know, Horribly, horribly off but I think, you know, it's boosting the accuracy by a little bit. So, maybe that's the biggest reason why. In terms of asking for help, and whether we're benchmarking asking for help yes we are.[00:32:29] Speaker: So one one thing we're working on now, which we're hoping to put out soon, is we we basically made SuperVig. Sweep edge issues. Like I'm having a, I'm having a problem with the matrix multiply. Please help. Because these are like, if anybody's run a popular open source, like framework, these are what half your issues are.[00:32:49] Speaker: You're like users show up and say like, my screen doesn't work. What, what's wrong or something. And so then you need to ask them questions and how to reproduce. So yeah, we're, we're, we're working on [00:33:00] that. I think. It, my impression is that agents are not very good at asking for help, even Claude. So like when, when they ask for help, they'll ask for help when they don't need it.[00:33:11] Speaker: And then won't ask for help when they do need it. So this is definitely like an issue, I think.[00:33:20] Speaker 4: Thanks for the great talk. I also have two questions.[00:33:23] Q&A: Web Agents and Interaction Methods[00:33:23] Speaker 4: It's first one can you talk a bit more about how the web agent interacts with So is there a VLM that looks at the web page layout and then you parse the HTML and select which buttons to click on? And if so do you think there's a future where there's like, so I work at Bing Microsoft AI.[00:33:41] Speaker 4: Do you think there's a future where the same web index, but there's an agent friendly web index where all the processing is done offline so that you don't need to spend time. Cleaning up, like, cleaning up these TML and figuring out what to click online. And any thoughts on, thoughts on that?[00:33:57] Speaker: Yeah, so great question. There's a lot of work on web [00:34:00] agents. I didn't go into, like, all of the details, but I think there's There's three main ways that agents interact with websites. The first way is the simplest way and the newest way, but it doesn't work very well, which is you take a screenshot of the website and then you click on a particular pixel value on the website.[00:34:23] Speaker: And Like models are not very good at that at the moment. Like they'll misclick. There was this thing about how like clawed computer use started like looking at pictures of Yellowstone national park or something like this. I don't know if you heard about this anecdote, but like people were like, oh, it's so human, it's looking for vacation.[00:34:40] Speaker: And it was like, no, it probably just misclicked on the wrong pixels and accidentally clicked on an ad. So like this is the simplest way. The second simplest way. You take the HTML and you basically identify elements in the HTML. You don't use any vision whatsoever. And then you say, okay, I want to click on this element.[00:34:59] Speaker: I want to enter text [00:35:00] in this element or something like that. But HTML is too huge. So it actually, it usually gets condensed down into something called an accessibility tree, which was made for screen readers for visually impaired people. And So that's another way. And then the third way is kind of a hybrid where you present the screenshot, but you also present like a textual summary of the output.[00:35:18] Speaker: And that's the one that I think will probably work best. What we're using is we're just using text at the moment. And that's just an implementation issue that we haven't implemented the. Visual stuff yet, but that's kind of like we're working on it now. Another thing that I should point out is we actually have two modalities for web browsing.[00:35:35] Speaker: Very recently we implemented this. And the reason why is because if you want to interact with full websites you will need to click on all of the elements or have the ability to click on all of the elements. But most of our work that we need websites for is just web browsing and like gathering information.[00:35:50] Speaker: So we have another modality where we convert all of it to markdown because that's like way more concise and easier for the agent to deal with. And then [00:36:00] can we create an index specifically for agents, maybe a markdown index or something like that would be, you know, would make sense. Oh, how would I make a successor to Swebench?[00:36:10] Speaker: So I mean, the first thing is there's like live code bench, which live code bench is basically continuously updating to make sure it doesn't leak into language model training data. That's easy to do for Swebench because it comes from real websites and those real websites are getting new issues all the time.[00:36:27] Speaker: So you could just do it on the same benchmarks that they have there. There's also like a pretty large number of things covering various coding tasks. So like, for example, Swebunch is mainly fixing issues, but there's also like documentation, there's generating tests that actually test the functionality that you want.[00:36:47] Speaker: And there there was a paper by a student at CMU on generating tests and stuff like that. So I feel like. Swebench is one piece of the puzzle, but you could also have like 10 different other tasks and then you could have like a composite [00:37:00] benchmark where you test all of these abilities, not just that particular one.[00:37:04] Speaker: Well, lots, lots of other things too, but[00:37:11] Speaker 2: Question from across. Use your mic, it will help. Um,[00:37:15] Speaker 5: Great talk. Thank you.[00:37:16] Q&A: Agent Architectures and Improvements[00:37:16] Speaker 5: My question is about your experience designing agent architectures. Specifically how much do you have to separate concerns in terms of tasks specific agents versus having one agent to do three or five things with a gigantic prompt with conditional paths and so on.[00:37:35] Speaker: Yeah, so that's a great question. So we have a basic coding and browsing agent. And I won't say basic, like it's a good, you know, it's a good agent, but it does coding and browsing. And it has instructions about how to do coding and browsing. That is enough for most things. Especially given a strong language model that has a lot of background knowledge about how to solve different types of tasks and how to use different APIs and stuff like that.[00:37:58] Speaker: We do have [00:38:00] a mechanism for something called micro agents. And micro agents are basically something that gets added to the prompt when a trigger is triggered. Right now it's very, very rudimentary. It's like if you detect the word GitHub anywhere, you get instructions about how to interact with GitHub, like use the API and don't browse.[00:38:17] Speaker: Also another one that I just added is for NPM, the like JavaScript package manager. And NPM, when it runs and it hits a failure, it Like hits in interactive terminals where it says, would you like to quit? Yep. Enter yes. And if that does it, it like stalls our agent for the time out until like two minutes.[00:38:36] Speaker: So like I added a new microagent whenever it started using NPM, it would Like get instructions about how to not use interactive terminal and stuff like that. So that's our current solution. Honestly, I like it a lot. It's simple. It's easy to maintain. It works really well and stuff like that. But I think there is a world where you would want something more complex than that.[00:38:55] Speaker 5: Got it. Thank you.[00:38:59] Speaker 6: I got a [00:39:00] question about MCP. I feel like this is the Anthropic Model Context Protocol. It seems like the most successful type of this, like, standardization of interactions between computers and agents. Are you guys adopting it? Is there any other competing standard?[00:39:16] Speaker 6: Anything, anything thought about it?[00:39:17] Speaker: Yeah, I think the Anth, so the Anthropic MCP is like, a way to It, it's essentially a collection of APIs that you can use to interact with different things on the internet. I, I think it's not a bad idea, but it, it's like, there's a few things that bug me a little bit about it.[00:39:40] Speaker: It's like we already have an API for GitHub, so why do we need an MCP for GitHub? Right. You know, like GitHub has an API, the GitHub API is evolving. We can look up the GitHub API documentation. So it seems like kind of duplicated a little bit. And also they have a setting where [00:40:00] it's like you have to spin up a server to serve your GitHub stuff.[00:40:04] Speaker: And you have to spin up a server to serve your like, you know, other stuff. And so I think it makes, it makes sense if you really care about like separation of concerns and security and like other things like this, but right now we haven't seen, we haven't seen that. To have a lot more value than interacting directly with the tools that are already provided.[00:40:26] Speaker: And that kind of goes into my general philosophy, which is we're already developing things for programmers. You know,[00:40:36] Speaker: how is an agent different than from a programmer? And it is different, obviously, you know, like agents are different from programmers, but they're not that different at this point. So we can kind of interact with the interfaces we create for, for programmers. Yeah. I might change my mind later though.[00:40:51] Speaker: So we'll see.[00:40:54] Speaker 7: Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Very interesting talk. You were saying that the agents you have right now [00:41:00] solve like maybe 30 percent of your, your issues out of the gate. I'm curious of the things that it doesn't do. Is there like a pattern that you observe? Like, Oh, like these are the sorts of things that it just seems to really struggle with, or is it just seemingly random?[00:41:15] Speaker: It's definitely not random. It's like, if you think it's more complex than it's. Like, just intuitively, it's more likely to fail. I've gotten a bit better at prompting also, so like, just to give an example it, it will sometimes fail to fix a GitHub workflow because it will not look at the GitHub workflow and understand what the GitHub workflow is doing before it solves the problem.[00:41:43] Speaker: So I, I think actually probably the biggest thing that it fails at is, um, er, that our, our agent plus Claude fails at is insufficient information gathering before trying to solve the task. And so if you provide all, if you provide instructions that it should do information [00:42:00] gathering beforehand, it tends to do well.[00:42:01] Speaker: If you don't provide sufficient instructions, it will try to solve the task without, like, fully understanding the task first, and then fail, and then you need to go back and give feedback. You know, additional feedback. Another example, like, I, I love this example. While I was developing the the monitor website that I, I showed here, we hit a really tricky bug where it was writing out a cache file to a different directory than it was reading the cache file from.[00:42:26] Speaker: And I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what was going on. I, I thought the bug was in a different part of the code, but what I asked it to do was come up with five possible reasons why this could be failing and decreasing order of likelihood and examine all of them. And that worked and it could just go in and like do that.[00:42:44] Speaker: So like I think a certain level of like scaffolding about like how it should sufficiently Gather all the information that's necessary in order to solve a task is like, if that's missing, then that's probably the biggest failure point at the moment. [00:43:00][00:43:01] Speaker 7: Thanks.[00:43:01] Speaker 6: Yeah.[00:43:06] Speaker 6: I'm just, I'm just using this as a chance to ask you all my questions.[00:43:09] Q&A: Self-Improving Agents and Authentication[00:43:09] Speaker 6: You had a, you had a slide on here about like self improving agents or something like that with memory. It's like a really throwaway slide for like a super powerful idea. It got me thinking about how I would do it. I have no idea how.[00:43:21] Speaker 6: So I just wanted you to chain a thought more on this.[00:43:25] Speaker: Yeah, self, self improving. So I think the biggest reason, like the simplest possible way to create a self improving agent. The problem with that is to have a really, really strong language model that with infinite context, and it can just go back and look at like all of its past experiences and, you know, learn from them.[00:43:46] Speaker: You might also want to remove the bad stuff just so it doesn't over index on it's like failed past experiences. But the problem is a really powerful language model is large. Infinite context is expensive. We don't have a good way to [00:44:00] index into it because like rag, Okay. At least in my experience, RAG from language to code doesn't work super well.[00:44:08] Speaker: So I think in the end, it's like, that's the way I would like to solve this problem. I'd like to have an infinite context and somehow be able to index into it appropriately. And I think that would mostly solve it. Another thing you can do is fine tuning. So I think like RAG is one way to get information into your model.[00:44:23] Speaker: Fine tuning is another way to get information into your model. So. That might be another way of continuously improving. Like you identify when you did a good job and then just add all of the good examples into your model.[00:44:34] Speaker 6: Yeah. So, you know, how like Voyager tries to write code into a skill library and then you reuse as a skill library, right?[00:44:40] Speaker 6: So that it improves in the sense that it just builds up the skill library over time.[00:44:44] Speaker: Yep.[00:44:44] Speaker 6: One thing I was like thinking about and there's this idea of, from, from Devin, your, your arch nemesis of playbooks. I don't know if you've seen them.[00:44:52] Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we're calling them workflows, but they're simpler.[00:44:55] Speaker 6: Yeah, so like, basically, like, you should, like, once a workflow works, you can kind of, [00:45:00] like, persist them as a skill library. Yeah. Right? Like I, I feel like that there's a, that's like some in between, like you said, you know, it's hard to do rag between language and code, but I feel like that is ragged for, like, I've done this before, last time I did it, this, this worked.[00:45:14] Speaker 6: So I'm just going to shortcut. All the stuff that failed before.[00:45:18] Speaker: Yeah, I totally, I think it's possible. It's just, you know, not, not trivial at the same time. I'll explain the two curves. So basically, the base, the baseline is just an agent that does it from scratch every time. And this curve up here is agent workflow memory where it's like adding the successful experiences back into the prompt.[00:45:39] Speaker: Why is this improving? The reason why is because just it failed on the first few examples and for the average to catch up it, it took a little bit of time. So it's not like this is actually improving it. You could just basically view the this one is constant and then this one is like improving.[00:45:56] Speaker: Like this, basically you can see it's continuing to go [00:46:00] up.[00:46:01] Speaker 8: How do you think we're going to solve the authentication problem for agents right now?[00:46:05] Speaker: When you say authentication, you mean like credentials, like, yeah.[00:46:09] Speaker 8: Yeah. Cause I've seen a few like startup solutions today, but it seems like it's limited to the amount of like websites or actual like authentication methods that it's capable of performing today.[00:46:19] Speaker: Yeah. Great questions. So. My preferred solution to this at the moment is GitHub like fine grained authentication tokens and GitHub fine grained authentication tokens allow you to specify like very free. On a very granular basis on this repo, you have permission to do this, on this repo, you have permission to do this.[00:46:41] Speaker: You also can prevent people from pushing to the main branch unless they get approved. You can do all of these other things. And I think these were all developed for human developers. Or like, the branch protection rules were developed for human developers. The fine grained authentication tokens were developed for GitHub apps.[00:46:56] Speaker: I think for GitHub, maybe [00:47:00] just pushing this like a little bit more is the way to do this. For other things, they're totally not prepared to give that sort of fine grained control. Like most APIs don't have something like a fine grained authentication token. And that goes into my like comment that we're going to need to prepare the world for agents, I think.[00:47:17] Speaker: But I think like the GitHub authentication tokens are like a good template for how you could start doing that maybe, but yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't have an answer.[00:47:25] Speaker 8: I'll let you know if I find one.[00:47:26] Speaker: Okay. Yeah.[00:47:31] Live Demonstration and Closing Remarks[00:47:31] Speaker: I'm going to finish up. Let, let me just see.[00:47:37] Speaker: Okay. So this one this one did write a script. I'm not going to actually read it for you. And then the other one, let's see.[00:47:51] Speaker: Yeah. So it sent a PR, sorry. What is, what is the PR URL?[00:48:00][00:48:02] Speaker: So I don't, I don't know if this sorry, that's taking way longer than it should. Okay, cool. Yeah. So this one sent a PR. I'll, I'll tell you later if this actually like successfully Oh, no, it's deployed on Vercel, so I can actually show you, but let's, let me try this real quick. Sorry. I know I don't have time.[00:48:24] Speaker: Yeah, there you go. I have pie charts now. So it's so fun. It's so fun to play with these things. Cause you could just do that while I'm giving a, you know, talk and things like that. So, yeah, thanks. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all all our LS supporters who helped fund the gorgeous venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.Of perennial interest, particularly at academic conferences, is scaled-up architecture research as people hunt for the next Attention Is All You Need. We have many names for them: “efficient models”, “retentive networks”, “subquadratic attention” or “linear attention” but some of them don't even have any lineage with attention - one of the best papers of this NeurIPS was Sepp Hochreiter's xLSTM, which has a particularly poetic significance as one of the creators of the LSTM returning to update and challenge the OG language model architecture:So, for lack of a better term, we decided to call this segment “the State of Post-Transformers” and fortunately everyone rolled with it.We are fortunate to have two powerful friends of the pod to give us an update here:* Together AI: with CEO Vipul Ved Prakash and CTO Ce Zhang joining us to talk about how they are building Together together as a quote unquote full stack AI startup, from the lowest level kernel and systems programming to the highest level mathematical abstractions driving new model architectures and inference algorithms, with notable industry contributions from RedPajama v2, Flash Attention 3, Mamba 2, Mixture of Agents, BASED, Sequoia, Evo, Dragonfly, Dan Fu's ThunderKittens and many more research projects this year* Recursal AI: with CEO Eugene Cheah who has helped lead the independent RWKV project while also running Featherless AI. This year, the team has shipped RWKV v5, codenamed Eagle, to 1.5 billion Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines worldwide, to support Microsoft's on-device, energy-usage-sensitive Windows Copilot usecases, and has launched the first updates on RWKV v6, codenamed Finch and GoldFinch. On the morning of Latent Space Live, they also announced QRWKV6, a Qwen 32B model modified with RWKV linear attention layers. We were looking to host a debate between our speakers, but given that both of them were working on post-transformers alternativesFull Talk on YoutubePlease like and subscribe!LinksAll the models and papers they picked:* Earlier Cited Work* Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention* Hungry hungry hippos: Towards language modeling with state space models* Hyena hierarchy: Towards larger convolutional language models* Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces* S4: Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces* Just Read Twice (Arora et al)* Recurrent large language models that compete with Transformers in language modeling perplexity are emerging at a rapid rate (e.g., Mamba, RWKV). Excitingly, these architectures use a constant amount of memory during inference. However, due to the limited memory, recurrent LMs cannot recall and use all the information in long contexts leading to brittle in-context learning (ICL) quality. A key challenge for efficient LMs is selecting what information to store versus discard. In this work, we observe the order in which information is shown to the LM impacts the selection difficulty. * To formalize this, we show that the hardness of information recall reduces to the hardness of a problem called set disjointness (SD), a quintessential problem in communication complexity that requires a streaming algorithm (e.g., recurrent model) to decide whether inputted sets are disjoint. We empirically and theoretically show that the recurrent memory required to solve SD changes with set order, i.e., whether the smaller set appears first in-context. * Our analysis suggests, to mitigate the reliance on data order, we can put information in the right order in-context or process prompts non-causally. Towards that end, we propose: (1) JRT-Prompt, where context gets repeated multiple times in the prompt, effectively showing the model all data orders. This gives 11.0±1.3 points of improvement, averaged across 16 recurrent LMs and the 6 ICL tasks, with 11.9× higher throughput than FlashAttention-2 for generation prefill (length 32k, batch size 16, NVidia H100). We then propose (2) JRT-RNN, which uses non-causal prefix-linear-attention to process prompts and provides 99% of Transformer quality at 360M params., 30B tokens and 96% at 1.3B params., 50B tokens on average across the tasks, with 19.2× higher throughput for prefill than FA2.* Jamba: A 52B Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model* We present Jamba, a new base large language model based on a novel hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. * Specifically, Jamba interleaves blocks of Transformer and Mamba layers, enjoying the benefits of both model families. MoE is added in some of these layers to increase model capacity while keeping active parameter usage manageable. * This flexible architecture allows resource- and objective-specific configurations. In the particular configuration we have implemented, we end up with a powerful model that fits in a single 80GB GPU.* Built at large scale, Jamba provides high throughput and small memory footprint compared to vanilla Transformers, and at the same time state-of-the-art performance on standard language model benchmarks and long-context evaluations. Remarkably, the model presents strong results for up to 256K tokens context length. * We study various architectural decisions, such as how to combine Transformer and Mamba layers, and how to mix experts, and show that some of them are crucial in large scale modeling. We also describe several interesting properties of these architectures which the training and evaluation of Jamba have revealed, and plan to release checkpoints from various ablation runs, to encourage further exploration of this novel architecture. We make the weights of our implementation of Jamba publicly available under a permissive license.* SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers* We introduce Sana, a text-to-image framework that can efficiently generate images up to 4096×4096 resolution. Sana can synthesize high-resolution, high-quality images with strong text-image alignment at a remarkably fast speed, deployable on laptop GPU. Core designs include: * (1) Deep compression autoencoder: unlike traditional AEs, which compress images only 8×, we trained an AE that can compress images 32×, effectively reducing the number of latent tokens. * (2) Linear DiT: we replace all vanilla attention in DiT with linear attention, which is more efficient at high resolutions without sacrificing quality. * (3) Decoder-only text encoder: we replaced T5 with modern decoder-only small LLM as the text encoder and designed complex human instruction with in-context learning to enhance the image-text alignment. * (4) Efficient training and sampling: we propose Flow-DPM-Solver to reduce sampling steps, with efficient caption labeling and selection to accelerate convergence. * As a result, Sana-0.6B is very competitive with modern giant diffusion model (e.g. Flux-12B), being 20 times smaller and 100+ times faster in measured throughput. Moreover, Sana-0.6B can be deployed on a 16GB laptop GPU, taking less than 1 second to generate a 1024×1024 resolution image. Sana enables content creation at low cost. * RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era* Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit linear scaling in memory and computational requirements but struggle to match the same performance as Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. * We propose a novel model architecture, Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs.* Our approach leverages a linear attention mechanism and allows us to formulate the model as either a Transformer or an RNN, thus parallelizing computations during training and maintains constant computational and memory complexity during inference. * We scale our models as large as 14 billion parameters, by far the largest dense RNN ever trained, and find RWKV performs on par with similarly sized Transformers, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. This work presents a significant step towards reconciling trade-offs between computational efficiency and model performance in sequence processing tasks.* LoLCATs: On Low-Rank Linearizing of Large Language Models* Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However, linearizing LLMs often significantly degrades model quality, still requires training over billions of tokens, and remains limited to smaller 1.3B to 7B LLMs. * We thus propose Low-rank Linear Conversion via Attention Transfer (LoLCATs), a simple two-step method that improves LLM linearizing quality with orders of magnitudes less memory and compute. * We base these steps on two findings. * First, we can replace an LLM's softmax attentions with closely-approximating linear attentions, simply by training the linear attentions to match their softmax counterparts with an output MSE loss ("attention transfer").* Then, this enables adjusting for approximation errors and recovering LLM quality simply with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). * LoLCATs significantly improves linearizing quality, training efficiency, and scalability. We significantly reduce the linearizing quality gap and produce state-of-the-art subquadratic LLMs from Llama 3 8B and Mistral 7B v0.1, leading to 20+ points of improvement on 5-shot MMLU. * Furthermore, LoLCATs does so with only 0.2% of past methods' model parameters and 0.4% of their training tokens. * Finally, we apply LoLCATs to create the first linearized 70B and 405B LLMs (50x larger than prior work). * When compared with prior approaches under the same compute budgets, LoLCATs significantly improves linearizing quality, closing the gap between linearized and original Llama 3.1 70B and 405B LLMs by 77.8% and 78.1% on 5-shot MMLU.Timestamps* [00:02:27] Intros* [00:03:16] Why Scale Context Lengths? or work on Efficient Models* [00:06:07] The Story of SSMs* [00:09:33] Idea 1: Approximation -> Principled Modeling* [00:12:14] Idea 3: Selection* [00:15:07] Just Read Twice* [00:16:51] Idea 4: Test Time Compute* [00:17:32] Idea 2: Hardware & Kernel Support* [00:19:49] RWKV vs SSMs* [00:24:24] RWKV Arch* [00:26:15] QWRKWv6 launch* [00:30:00] What's next* [00:33:21] Hot Takes - does anyone really need long context?Transcript[00:00:00] AI Charlie: We're back at Latent Space Live, our first mini conference held at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. This is Charlie, your AI co host. As a special treat this week, we're recapping the best of 2024 going domain by domain. We sent out a survey to the over 900 of you who told us what you wanted, and then invited the best speakers in the Latent Space Network to cover each field.[00:00:24] AI Charlie: 200 of you joined us in person throughout the day, with over 2200 watching live online. Thanks Our next keynote covers the State of Transformers alternative architectures, with a special joint presentation with Dan Fu of Together AI and Eugene Chia of Recursal AI and Featherless AI. We've featured both Together and Recursal on the pod before, with CEO Veepal Vedprakash introducing them.[00:00:49] AI Charlie: And CTO CE Zhang joining us to talk about how they are building together together as a quote unquote full stack AI startup from the lowest level kernel and systems [00:01:00] programming to the highest level mathematical abstractions driving new model architectures and inference algorithms with notable industry contributions from Red Pajama V2, Flash Attention 3, Mamba 2, Mixture of Agents.[00:01:15] AI Charlie: Based, Sequoia, Evo, Dragonfly, Danfoo's Thunder Kittens, and many more research projects this year. As for Recursal and Featherless, we were the first podcast to feature RWKV last year, and this year the team has shipped RWKV v5, codenamed Eagle, to 1. 5 billion Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines worldwide to support Microsoft's on device, end Energy Usage Sensitive Windows Copilot Use Cases and has launched the first updates on RWKV v6, codenamed Finch and Goldfinch.[00:01:53] AI Charlie: On the morning of Latent Space Live, they also announced QRdata UKv6, a QEN32B model [00:02:00] modified with RDWKV linear attention layers. Eugene has also written the most single most popular guest post on the Latent Space blog this year. Yes, we do take guest posts on what he has discovered about the H100 GPU inference NeoCloud market since the successful launch of Featherless AI this year.[00:02:20] AI Charlie: As always, don't forget to check the show notes for the YouTube link to their talk as well as their slides. Watch out and take care.[00:02:27] Intros[00:02:27] Dan Fu: Yeah, so thanks so much for having us. So this is going to be a little bit of a two part presentation. My name is Dan. I'm at Together AI, and I'll be joining UCSD as faculty in about a year. And Eugene, you want to introduce yourself?[00:02:46] Eugene Cheah: Eugene, I lead the art activity team, and I, I'm CEO of Featherless, and we both work on this new post transformer architecture space.[00:02:55] Dan Fu: Yeah, so yeah, so today we're really excited to talk to you a little bit [00:03:00] about that. So first I'm going to give a broad overview of kind of the last few years of progress in non post transformer architectures. And then afterwards Eugene will tell us a little bit about the latest and the greatest and the latest frontier models in this space.[00:03:16] Why Scale Context Lengths? or work on Efficient Models[00:03:16] Dan Fu: So, the story starts with Scaling. So this is probably a figure or something like this that you've seen very recently. Over the last five to six years, we've seen models really scale up in parameter size, and that's brought with it a bunch of new capabilities, like the ability to talk to you and tell you sometimes how to use your Colab screens.[00:03:35] Dan Fu: But another place where we've seen scaling especially recently is scaling in context length. So this can mean Having more text inputs for your models, but it can also mean things like taking a lot of visual token inputs image inputs to your models or generating lots of outputs. And one thing that's been really exciting over the last few months or so is that we're, we're seeing scaling, not only during training time, but also [00:04:00] during test time.[00:04:00] Dan Fu: So this is one of the, the, this is the iconic image from the OpenAI 01 release. Not only are we starting to scale train time compute, but we're also starting to scale test time compute. Now if you're familiar with our attention and our transformer architectures today, this graph on the right might look a little bit scary.[00:04:19] Dan Fu: And one of the reasons is that the implications are a little bit Interesting. So what does it mean if we want to continue having smarter and smarter models? Do we just need to start building bigger, bigger data centers, spending more flops? Is this this little Dolly 3, we need more flops, guys? Is this going to be the future of all of AI?[00:04:39] Dan Fu: Or is there a better way, another path forward? Maybe we can get the same capabilities that we've gotten used to, But for a lot less compute, a lot less flops. And one of the things that we're going to talk about today is specifically looking at that core attention operator in some of these models.[00:04:57] Dan Fu: And the reason is that so this is just some, some [00:05:00] basic you know, scaling curves, but attention has compute that scales quadratically in the context length. So that means that if you're doing something like test time compute and you want to spend a bunch of tokens thinking about what comes next, the longer that that goes the, the, the more tokens you spend on that, that compute grows quadratically in that.[00:05:19] Dan Fu: One of the questions that we're interested in is, can we take that basic sequence model, that basic sequence primitive at the bottom, and get it to scale better? Can we scale in, let's say, n to the 3 halves or n log n? So in, in the first part of the talk, so we just went over the introduction. What I'm gonna do over the next few slides is just talk about some of the key advances and ideas that have shown over the past few years since maybe early 2020 to, to now that shown promise that this might actually be possible.[00:05:48] Dan Fu: That you can actually get potentially the same quality that we want while scale, while scaling better. So to do that, we're and, and basically the, the story that we're gonna look is we're gonna start to see [00:06:00] how. So this is a basic graph of just the past couple years of progress of perplexity where that blue line, that dotted blue line, is attention.[00:06:07] The Story of SSMs[00:06:07] Dan Fu: It's your basic transformer, full dense attention. And then the dots coming down are some of the methods that you'll see in this presentation today. We're going to turn the clock back all the way to 2020. So this, this, this question of can we make attention subquadratic? Basically, as soon as we said attention is all you need, People started asking this question.[00:06:28] Dan Fu: So we have this quadratic attention operator. Can we do better? I'll briefly talk about why attention is quadratic. And the basic thing that happens, if you're not familiar, is that you have these inputs, these keys and queries. And what you do in this attention matrix, this S matrix over here, is that you're using, you're comparing every token in your input to every other token.[00:06:49] Dan Fu: So when I try to do something like upload a whole book to Gemini, what happens beyond the Maybe not Gemini, because we don't necessarily know what architecture is. But let's say we upload it to LLAMA, what happens beyond [00:07:00] the scenes, behind the scenes, is that it's going to take every single word in that book and compare it to every other word.[00:07:05] Dan Fu: And this has been a really, it's, it's led to some pretty impressive things. But it's kind of a brute forcing of the way that you would try to interpret a interpret something. And what attention does in particular is the, and then what attention, sorry, don't want to. Okay, no, no laser pointer. What, what attention does afterwards is that instead of always operating in this quadratic thing, it takes a row wise softmax over this matrix, and then multiplies it by this values matrix.[00:07:32] Dan Fu: So, one of the key points to notice is that the output size is always going to be the same as the inputs, at least in standard self attention. So one of the first things that folks tried to do around 2020 is this thing called linear attention, which is just, just noticing that if we take out this softmax from here, if we take out this non linearity in the middle of the attention operation, and then if you compute the keys and the values operation first, you actually never hit this quadratic bottleneck.[00:07:57] Dan Fu: So that, that's potentially a way [00:08:00] to get a lot more computationally efficient. And there are various ways to do this by basically using feature maps or try to approximate this overall attention computation. But some of this work sort of started to hit a wall in 2020. And the basic challenges were, were two.[00:08:16] Dan Fu: So one was quality. It was back then, it was kind of hard to, to get good quality with these linear attention operators. The other one was actually hardware efficiency. So these, this feature map that was just shown by a simplify simplify here. Actually ends up being quite computationally expensive if you just implement it naively.[00:08:34] Dan Fu: So you started having these operators that not only were you sure, you're not really sure if they have the same quality, but also they're actually just wall clock slower. So you kind of end up getting the worst of both worlds. So this was the the stage. So that kind of sets the stage for four years ago.[00:08:49] Dan Fu: Keep this in mind because linear attention is actually going to come back in a few years once we have a better understanding. But one of the works that started kicking off this, this [00:09:00] mini revolution in post transformer architectures was this idea called states based model. So here the seminal work is, is one about our work queue in 2022.[00:09:09] Dan Fu: And this, this piece of work really brought together a few ideas from, from some long running research research lines of work. The first one was, and this is really one of the keys to, to closing the gap in quality was just using things that, that if you talk to a, a, an electrical engineer off the street, they might know off, off the, like the back of their hand.[00:09:33] Idea 1: Approximation -> Principled Modeling[00:09:33] Dan Fu: But taking some of those properties with how we model dynamical systems in signal processing and then using those ideas to model the inputs, the, the text tokens in, for example a transformer like Next Token Prediction Architecture. So some of those early states-based model papers were looking at this relatively, relatively simple recurrent update model that comes from maybe chapter one of a signal processing class.[00:09:59] Dan Fu: But then using [00:10:00] some principle theory about how you should do that recurrent update in order to really get the most that you can out of your hidden state, out of your out of your sequence. So that, that was one key idea for quality and. When this was eventually realized, you started to see a bunch of benchmarks that were pretty sticky for a few years.[00:10:20] Dan Fu: Things like long range arena, some long sequence evaluation benchmarks, There was stuff in time series, time series analysis. They started to, you started to see the quality tick up in meaningful ways. But the other key thing that What's so influential about these states based models is that they also had a key idea about how you can compute these things efficiently.[00:10:45] Dan Fu: So if you go back to your machine learning 101 class where you learned about RNNs, one thing that you may have learned is that they don't paralyze as well as detention, because if you just run them naively, you have to do this kind of sequential update to process new tokens, [00:11:00] whereas in attention, you can process all the tokens in parallel at one time.[00:11:04] Dan Fu: One of the key insights behind the S4 paper was that these recurrent models, you could take them and you could also formulate them as a convolution. And in particular, with a convolution, you could, instead of using a PyTorch conv1d operation, you can compute that with the FFT. And that would give you n log n compute in the in the sequence length n with an operator that was relatively well optimized for modern hardware.[00:11:28] Dan Fu: So those are really, I'd say, the two key ideas in 2022 that started allowing these breakthroughs to happen in these non transformer architectures. So, these ideas about how to principally model sorry, how to model the recurrent updates of a mo of, of a sequence in a principled way, and also these key ideas in how you can compute it efficiently by turning it into a convolution and then scaling it up with the FFT.[00:11:53] Dan Fu: Along those same lines, so afterwards we started putting out some work on specialized kernels, so just [00:12:00] like we have flash attention for transformers, we also have works like flash fft conf, and if you look at these lines of work oftentimes when, whenever you see a new architecture, you see a new primitive one of the, one of the table stakes now is, do you have an efficient kernel so that you can actually get wall clock speed up?[00:12:14] Idea 3: Selection[00:12:14] Dan Fu: So by 2022, We are starting to have these models that had promising quality primitives, but and, and also promising wall clocks. So you could actually see regimes where they were better than transformers in meaningful ways. That being said, there were, there's still sometimes a quality gap, particularly for language modeling.[00:12:33] Dan Fu: And because languages, It's so core to what we do in sequence modeling these days the, the next, the next key idea that I'm going to talk about is this idea of selection mechanisms. And this is basically an idea of, so you have this recurrent state that you're keeping around that just summarizes everything that, that came before.[00:12:50] Dan Fu: And to get a good sequence model, one of the things that you really need to be able to do is have the model learn what's the best way to pick out pieces from that recurrent [00:13:00] state. So one of the, one of the major ideas here in a line of work called H3, Hungry Hungry Hippos, and also these hyena models were One way you can do this is by just adding some simple element wise gates.[00:13:13] Dan Fu: So versions of these ideas have been around for decades. If you squint at the LSTM paper you, you can probably find, find this gating mechanism. But turns out you can take those old ideas, add them into these new. state space models, and then you can see quality start to pick up. If you've heard of the Mamba model, this also takes the selection to the next level by actually making some changes in that fundamental recurrent state space.[00:13:40] Dan Fu: So, it's not only just this gating that happens around the SSM layer, but also you can actually make The ABCD matrices of your state space model, you can make them data dependent, which will allow you to even better select out different pieces from your hidden state depending on what you're seeing. I'll also point out if you look at the [00:14:00] bottom right of this figure, there's this little triangle with a GPU SRAM, GPU HBM, and this, this is just continuing that trend of when you have a new architecture you, you, you also release it with a kernel to, to, to show that it is hardware efficient, that it, that it can be hardware efficient on modern hardware.[00:14:17] Dan Fu: The, the, one of the next cool things that happened is once we had this understanding of these are the basic pieces, these are the basic principles behind some of the sequence models linear attention actually started to come back. So in earlier this year, there was a model called BASED the, from Simran Arora and, and some other folks, that combined a more principled version of linear attention that basically the, the, the, the two second summary is that it used a Taylor approximation of the softmax attention, combined that with a simple sliding window attention and was starting to able, starting to be able to expand the Pareto frontier of how much data can you recall from your sequence, versus how small is your recurrent state size.[00:14:58] Dan Fu: So those orange dots [00:15:00] are, at the top there, are just showing smaller sequences that can recall more memory.[00:15:07] Just Read Twice[00:15:07] Dan Fu: And the last major idea I think that has been influential in this line of work and is very relatively late breaking just a few months ago, is just the basic idea that when you have these models that are fundamentally more efficient in the sequence length, you maybe don't want to prompt them or use them in exactly the same way.[00:15:26] Dan Fu: So this was a really cool paper called Just Read Twice, also from Simran. That basically said, hey, all these efficient models can process tokens so much more efficiently than transformers that they can sometimes have unfair advantages compared to a simple transformer token. So, or sorry, a simple transformer model.[00:15:44] Dan Fu: So take, for example the standard, the standard use case of you have some long document, you're going to pass it in as input, and then you're going to ask some question about it. One problem you might imagine for a recurrent model where you have a fixed state size is, let's say that [00:16:00] you're. Article is very long, and you're trying to ask about some really niche thing.[00:16:04] Dan Fu: You can imagine it might be hard for the model to know ahead of time what information to put into the hidden state. But these, these, these models are so much more efficient that you can do something really stupid, like, you can just put the document write down the document, write down the question, write down the document again, and then write down the question again, and then this time, the second time that you go over that document, you know exactly what to look for.[00:16:25] Dan Fu: And the cool thing about this is, so this is, And this this results in better quality, especially on these recall intensive tasks. But the other interesting thing is it really takes advantage of the more efficient architectures that, that we're having here. So one of the other, I think, influential ideas in this line of work is if you change the fundamental compute capabilities of your model and the way that it scales, you can actually start to query it at test time differently.[00:16:51] Idea 4: Test Time Compute[00:16:51] Dan Fu: And this actually, of course, goes back to those slides on test time compute. So while everybody's looking at, say, test time compute for big transformer models, [00:17:00] I think potentially a really interesting research question is, how can you take those and how does it change with this new next generation of models?[00:17:09] Dan Fu: So the, I'll just briefly summarize what some of those key ideas were and then talk and then show you briefly kind of what the state of the art is today. So, so the four key ideas are instead of just doing a simple linear attention approximation, instead take ideas that we know from other fields like signal processing, do a more principled approach to your modeling of the sequence.[00:17:32] Idea 2: Hardware & Kernel Support[00:17:32] Dan Fu: Another key idea throughout all these lines of work is you really want. Hardware and kernel support from day one. So, so even if your model is theoretically more efficient if somebody goes and runs it and it's two times slower one of the things that, that we've learned is that if, if you're in that situation, it's, it's just gonna be dead on arrival.[00:17:49] Dan Fu: So you want to be designing your architectures one of the key, key machine learning ideas that has been important for the quality is just making sure that you encode different ways that you can [00:18:00] select from your hidden state and, and really focus on that as a key decider of quality. And finally, I think one of the, the, the emerging new, new things for, for this line of work and something that's quite interesting is, What are the right test time paradigms for these models?[00:18:15] Dan Fu: How do they change relative to relative to what you might do for a standard transformer? I'll briefly end this section. So I've labeled this slide where we are yesterday because Eugene is going to talk about some new models that he released literally this morning. But as of yesterday, some of the really cool results out of the, these efficient alternative models were so AI2 trained this hybrid MOE called Jamba.[00:18:40] Dan Fu: That, that, that seems, that is currently the state of the art for these non transformer architectures. There's this NVIDIA and MIT put out this new diffusion model called SANA recently that one of their key key observations is that you can take a standard diffusion transformer diffusion model, replace the layers with linear [00:19:00] attention, and then that lets you scale to much larger much larger images, much, much Much larger sequences more efficiently.[00:19:07] Dan Fu: And and one thing that I don't think anybody would have called when a few years ago is that one of those gated SSM, gated states based models ended up on the cover of Science because a great group of folks went and trained some DNA models. So that's Michael Polley, Eric Yuen from from Stanford and the Arc Institute.[00:19:26] Dan Fu: So it's, we're really at an exciting time in 2024 where these non transformer, post transformer architectures are showing promise across a wide range. Across a wide range of, of modalities, of applications, and, and of tasks. And with that, I'll pass it on to Eugene, who can tell you a little bit about the latest and greatest with RWKV.[00:19:49] RWKV vs SSMs[00:19:49] Eugene Cheah: So, that's useful? Yeah. You're talking to here. Oh, I'm talking to here. Okay. So, yeah, two streams. Yeah. So, I think one common questions that we tend to get asked, right, is what's the difference between [00:20:00] RWKV and state space? So I think one of the key things to really understand, right the difference between the two groups, right, is that we are actually more like an open source, random internet meets academia kind of situation.[00:20:11] Eugene Cheah: Like, most of us never wrote any paper, but we, we basically look at RNNs and linear intention when intention is all you need came out, and then we decided to like, hey there is a quadratic scaling problem. Why don't we try fixing that instead? So, so, so we end up developing our own branch, but we end up sharing ideas back and forth.[00:20:30] Eugene Cheah: So, and, and we do all this actively in Discord, GitHub, etc. This was so bad for a few years, right, that basically, the average group's H index was so close to zero, right, Illuter. ai actually came in and helped us write our first paper. Great, now our H index is now three, apparently. So, so, so, but, but the thing is, like, a lot of these experiments led to results, and, and, essentially, essentially, we we took the same ideas from linear attention, [00:21:00] and we built on it.[00:21:01] Eugene Cheah: So, to take a step back into, like, how does RWKB handle its own attention mechanic and achieve the same goals of, like, O and compute, respectively, and in focus of our overall goal to make AI accessible to everyone, regardless of language, nation, or compute, that's our goal. We actually train our models primarily on over a hundred languages, which is another topic altogether.[00:21:23] Eugene Cheah: And our goal is to train to even 200 languages to cover all languages in the world. But at the same time, we work on this architecture, To lower the compute cost so that people can run it on Raspberry Pis and on anything. So, how did RWKB break the dependency of LSTM token flow? Because I think to understand architecture, right, it's probably easier to understand it from the RNN lens.[00:21:46] Eugene Cheah: Because that's where we built on. We all, we all state space kind of like try to, try to start anew and took lessons from that and say, So there's a little bit of divergence there. And AKA, this our version of linear attention. So to take step back [00:22:00] all foundation models, be it transformers or non transformers at a very high level, right?[00:22:05] Eugene Cheah: Pumps in the token. I mean, text that things into embeddings and go through a lot of layers. Generate a lot of states where the QKV cache or be iron in states or RW KB states. And outputs and embedding, they are not the same thing. And we just take more layers and more embeddings. And somehow that magically works.[00:22:23] Eugene Cheah: So, if you, if you remember your ancient RNN lessons which we, which we, which we we call best learning these days the general idea is that you have the embedding information flowing all the way up, and when, and you take that information and you flow it back down, and then you process it as part of your LSTM layers.[00:22:41] Eugene Cheah: So, this is how it generally works. Kapati is quoted saying that RNNs are actually unreasonably effective. The problem is this is not scalable. To start doing work on the second token, you need to wait for the first token. And then you need to, and likewise for the third token and fourth token, yada yada.[00:22:55] Eugene Cheah: That is CPU land, not GPU land. So, so, so, you [00:23:00] can have a H100 and you can't even use 1 percent of it. So, so that's kind of why RNNs didn't really take off in the direction that we wanted, like, billions of parameters when it comes to training. So, what did RDAP KV version 0 do? Boom. We just did the dumbest, lamest thing.[00:23:13] Eugene Cheah: Sorry, this is the bottleneck for RNN. We did the dumb thing of removing that line. And it kind of worked. It trained. It sucked, but it kind of worked. Then we were like, hey, then no one cared because the loss was crap, but how do we improve that? And that's essentially where we move forward, because if you see this kind of flow, right, you can actually get your GPU saturated quickly, where it essentially cascades respectively.[00:23:41] Eugene Cheah: So I'm just waiting for this to loop again. So it's like, once you get your first layer, your token to be computed finish. You start to cascade your compute all the way until you are, Hey, I'm using 100 percent of the GPU. So we, we worked on it, and we started going along the principle of that as long as we keep this general architecture [00:24:00] where, where we can cascade and, and be highly efficient with our architecture, nothing is sacred in our architecture.[00:24:06] Eugene Cheah: And we have done some crazy ideas. In fact, you ask us, if you ask me to explain some things in the paper, right, officially in the paper, I'll say we had this idea and we wrote it this way. The reality is someone came with a code, we tested it, it worked, and then we rationalized later. So, so the general[00:24:24] RWKV Arch[00:24:24] Eugene Cheah: The idea behind rwkbr is that we generally have two major blocks that we do.[00:24:30] Eugene Cheah: We call time mix and channel mix. And time mix generally handles handles long term memory states, where essentially, where essentially where we apply the matrix multiplication and Cilu activation functions into processing an input embedding and an output embedding. I'm oversimplifying it because this, This calculation changed every version and we have, like, version 7 right now.[00:24:50] Eugene Cheah: ChannelMix is similar to Base in the sense that it does shorter term attention, where it just looks at the sister token, or the token before it, because [00:25:00] there's a shift in the token shift matrix. I don't really want to go too much into the papers itself, because, like, we do have three papers on this.[00:25:09] Eugene Cheah: Basically, RWKB, RNN for the transformer, ERA, Ego and Pinch, RWKB, Matrix Value State. This is the updated version 5, version 6. And Goldfinch is our, is, is, is, is our hybrid model respectively. We are writing the paper already for V seven and which is, which is for R wk V seven. Called, named Goose, or architectures are named by Bird.[00:25:30] Eugene Cheah: And, I'm going to cover as well, qrwkb, and mama100k, and rwkb, and Where did that lead to? Great! Because we are all GPU poor and to be clear, like, most of this research is done, like, only on a handful H100s, which I had one Google researcher told me that was, like, his experiment budget for a single researcher.[00:25:48] Eugene Cheah: So, our entire organization has less compute than a single researcher in Google. So We, we, one of the things that we explored into was to how do we convert transformer models instead? Because [00:26:00] someone already paid that billion dollars, a million dollars onto training, so why don't we take advantage of those weights?[00:26:05] Eugene Cheah: And, and to, I believe, together AI worked on the lockets for, for the Lambda side of things, and, and we took some ideas from there as well, and we essentially did that for RWKB.[00:26:15] QWRKWv6 launch[00:26:15] Eugene Cheah: And that led to, Q RWKB6, which we just dropped today, a 32 bit instruct preview model, where we took the Quen 32 bit instruct model, freeze the feedforward layer, remove the QKB attention layer, and replace it with RWKB linear layers.[00:26:32] Eugene Cheah: So to be clear, this means we do not have the rwkv channel mix layer, we only have the time mix layer. But but once we do that, we train the rwkv layer. Important is that the feedforward layer needs to be frozen, so the new attention can be learned. And then we unfreeze the feedforward layer, and train all the layers together with a custom learning rate schedule, so that they can learn how to work together.[00:26:54] Eugene Cheah: The end result, surprisingly, And, to be honest, to the frustration of the R. W. [00:27:00] KV MOE team, which ended up releasing the model on the same day, was that, with just a few hours of training on two nodes, we managed to get it to be on par, kind of, with the original QUAN32B model. So, in fact, when the first run, right, that completely confused us, it was like, and I was telling Daniel Goldstein, Smirky, who kind of leads most of our research coordination, When you pitched me this idea, you told me at best you'll get the same level of performance.[00:27:26] Eugene Cheah: You didn't tell me the challenge and score and Winograd score will shoot up. I don't know what's happening there. But it did. MMLU score dropping, that was expected. Because if you think about it, when we were training all the layers, right, we were essentially Like, Frankenstein this thing, and we did brain damage to the feedforward network layer 2 with the new RWKB layers.[00:27:47] Eugene Cheah: But, 76%, hey, somehow it's retained, and we can probably further train this. We didn't even spend more than 3 days training this, so there's a lot more that can be done, hence the preview. This brings up [00:28:00] a big question, because We are already now in the process of converting to 7TB. We are now, this is actually extremely compute efficient to test our attention mechanic.[00:28:10] Eugene Cheah: It's like, it becomes a shortcut. We can, we are already planning to do our version 7 and our hybrid architecture for it. Because we don't need to train from scratch. And we get a really good model out of it. And the other thing that is uncomfortable to say is that because we are doing right now on the 70b is that if this scales correctly to 128k context length, I'm not even talking about a million 128, majority of enterprise workload today is just on 70b at under 32k context length.[00:28:41] Eugene Cheah: That means if this works and the benchmark matches it, It means we can replace the vast majority of current AI workload, unless you want super long context. And then sorry, can someone give us more GPUs? Because we do need the VRAM for super long context, sadly. So yeah, that's what we are working on, and essentially, [00:29:00] we are excited about this to just push it further.[00:29:02] Eugene Cheah: And this conversion process, to be clear, I don't think it's going to be exclusive to RWKB. It probably will work for Mamba as well, I don't see why not. And we will probably see more ideas, or more experiments, or more hybrids, or Yeah, like, one of the weirdest things that I wanted to say outright, and I confirmed this with the Black Mamba team and the Jamba team, which because we did the GoFinch hybrid model, is that none of us understand why a hard hybrid with a state based model to be R.[00:29:28] Eugene Cheah: QA state space and transformer performs better when, than the baseline of both. It's like, it's like when you train one, you expect, and then you replace, you expect the same results. That's our pitch. That's our claim. But somehow when we jam both together, it outperforms both. And that's like one area of emulation that, like, we only have four experiments, plus four teams, that a lot more needs to be done.[00:29:51] Eugene Cheah: But, but these are things that excite me, essentially, because that is what it's potentially we can move ahead for. Which brings us to what comes next.[00:30:00] What's next[00:30:00] [00:30:00][00:30:00] Dan Fu: So, this part is kind of just some, where we'll talk a little bit about stuff that, that we're excited about. Maybe have some wild speculation on, on what, what's, what's coming next.[00:30:12] Dan Fu: And, of course this is also the part that will be more open to questions. So, a couple things that, that I'm excited about is continued hardware model co design for, for these models. So one of the things that we've put out recently is this library called ThunderKittens. It's a CUDA library.[00:30:29] Dan Fu: And one of the things that, that we found frustrating is every time that we built one of these new architectures, and I'm sure you had the exact same experience, we'd have to go and spend two months in CUDA land, like writing these, these new efficient things. And. If we decided to change one thing in PyTorch, like one line of PyTorch code is like a week of CUDA code at least.[00:30:47] Dan Fu: So one of our goals with, with a library like Thunderkitten, so we, we just broke down what are the key principles, what are the key hardware things what are the key, Compute pieces that you get from the hardware. So for example on [00:31:00] H100 everything is really revolves around a warp group matrix multiply operation.[00:31:06] Dan Fu: So you really want your operation to be able to split into relatively small matrix, matrix multiply operations. So like multiplying two 64 by 64 matrices, for example. And so if you know that ahead of time when you're designing your model, that probably gives you you know, some information about how you set the state sizes, how you set the update, how you set the update function.[00:31:27] Dan Fu: So with Thunderkittens we basically built a whole library just around this basic idea that all your basic compute primitives should not be a float, but it should be a matrix, and everything should just be matrix compute. And we've been using that to, to try to both re implement some existing architectures, and also start to design code.[00:31:44] Dan Fu: Some new ones that are really designed with this core with a tensor core primitive in mind. Another thing that that we're, that at least I'm excited about is we, over the last four or five years, we've really been looking at language models as the next thing. But if you've been paying [00:32:00] attention to Twitter there's been a bunch of new next generation models that are coming out.[00:32:04] Dan Fu: So there, there are. So, video generation models that can run real time, that are supported by your mouse and your keyboard, that I'm told if you play with them that, you know, that they only have a few seconds of memory. Can we take that model, can we give it a very long context length so that you could actually maybe generate an entire game state at a time?[00:32:25] Dan Fu: What does that look like for the model? You're certainly not going to do a giant quadratic attention computation to try to run that. Maybe, maybe use some of these new models, or some of these new video generation models that came out. So Sora came out I don't know, two days ago now. But with super long queue times and super long generation times.[00:32:43] Dan Fu: So that's probably a quadratic attention operation at the, at the bottom of it. What if we could remove that and get the same quality, but a lot faster generation time? Or some of the demos that we saw from Paige earlier today. You know, if I have a super long conversation with my [00:33:00] Gemini bot, what if I wanted to remember everything that it's seen in the last week?[00:33:06] Dan Fu: I mean, maybe you don't for personal reasons, but what if I did, you know? What does that mean for the architecture? And I think, you know, that's certainly something I'm pretty excited about. I'm sure you're excited about it too. So, I think we were supposed to have some hot takes, but I honestly don't remember what our hot takes were.[00:33:21] Hot Takes - does anyone really need long context?[00:33:21] Eugene Cheah: Yeah, including the next slide. Hot takes, yes, these are our[00:33:25] Dan Fu: hot takes.[00:33:25] Eugene Cheah: I think the big one on Twitter that we saw, that we shared, was the question is like, is RAG relevant? In the case of, like, the future of, like, state based models?[00:33:38] Dan Fu: Let's see, I haven't played too much with RAG. But when I have. I'll say I found it was a little bit challenging to do research on it because we had this experience over and over again, where you could have any, an embedding model of any quality, so you could have a really, really bad embedding model, or you could have a really, really [00:34:00] good one, By any measure of good.[00:34:03] Dan Fu: And for the final RAG application, it kind of didn't matter. That's what I'll say about RAG while I'm being recorded. I know it doesn't actually answer the question, but[00:34:13] Eugene Cheah: Yeah, so I think a lot of folks are like, extremely excited of the idea of RWKB or State Space potentially having infinite context.[00:34:21] Eugene Cheah: But I think the reality is that when we say infinite context, we just mean a different kind of infinite context, or you, or as it's previously covered, you need to test the model differently. So, think of it more along the lines of the human. Like, I don't remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday.[00:34:37] Eugene Cheah: Yeah, that's the statement that I'll say. And And we humans are not quadratic transformers. If we did, if let's say we increased our brain size for every second we live, we would have exploded by the time we are 5 years old or something like that. And, and I think, I think basically fundamentally for us, right, be it whether we, regardless of whether RWKB, statespace, XLSTM, [00:35:00] etc, our general idea is that instead of that expanding state, that increase in computational cost, what if we have a fixed state size?[00:35:08] Eugene Cheah: And Information theory detects that that fixed state size will have a limit. Just how big of a limit is a question, like, we, like, RWKB is running at 40 megabytes for, for its state. Its future version might run into 400 megabytes. That is like millions of tokens in, if you're talking about mathematically, the maximum possibility.[00:35:29] Eugene Cheah: It's just that I guess we were all more inefficient about it, so maybe we hit 100, 000. And that's kind of like the work we are doing, trying to like push it and maximize it. And that's where the models will start differing, because it will choose to forget things, it will choose to remember things. And that's why I think that there might be some element of right, but it may not be the same right.[00:35:49] Eugene Cheah: It may be the model learn things, and it's like, hmm, I can't remember that, that article. Let me do a database search, to search. Just like us humans, when we can't remember the article in the company. We do a search on Notion. [00:36:00][00:36:00] Dan Fu: I think something that would be really interesting is if you could have facts that are, so right now, the one intuition about language models is that all those parameters are around just to store random facts about the world.[00:36:14] Dan Fu: And this intuition comes from the observation that if you take a really small language model, it can do things like talk to you, or kind of has like the The style of conversation, it can learn that, but where it will usually fall over compared to a much larger one is it'll just be a lot less factual about things that it knows or that it can do.[00:36:32] Dan Fu: But that points to all those weights that we're spending, all that SGD that we're spending to train these models are just being used to store facts. And we have things like databases that are pretty good at storing facts. So I think one thing that would be really interesting is if we could actually have some sort of outside data store that a language model can can look at that that maybe is you know, has has some sort of gradient descent in it, but but would be quite interesting.[00:36:58] Dan Fu: And then maybe you could edit it, delete [00:37:00] facts, you know, change who's president so that it doesn't, it doesn't get lost.[00:37:04] Vibhu: Can we open up Q& A and hot takes for the audience? I have a hot take Q& A. Do these scale? When, when 405B state space model, RAG exists, no one does long context, who's throwing in 2 million token questions, hot takes?[00:37:24] Dan Fu: The, the who's throwing in 2 million token question, I think, is, is a really good question. So I actually, I was going to offer that as a hot take. I mean, my hot take was going to be that long context doesn't matter. I know I just gave a whole talk about it, but you know, what, what's the point of doing research if you can't, you know, play both sides.[00:37:40] Dan Fu: But I think one of the, so I think for both of us, the reason that we first got into this was just from the first principled questions of there's this quadratic thing. Clearly intelligence doesn't need to be quadratic. What is going on? Can we understand it better? You know, since then it's kind of turned into a race, which has [00:38:00] been exciting to watch, like, how much context you can take in.[00:38:03] Dan Fu: But I think it's right. Nobody is actually putting in a two million context prompt into these models. And, and, you know, if they are, maybe we can go, go You know, design a better model to do that particular thing. Yeah, what do you think about that? So you've also been working on this. Do you think long context matters?[00:38:19] Eugene Cheah: So I'm going to burn a bit. How many of you remember the news of Google Gemini supporting 3 million contacts, right? Raise your hand.[00:38:28] Vibhu: Yeah, 2 million.[00:38:29] Eugene Cheah: Oh, it's 2 million.[00:38:31] Eugene Cheah: Yeah, how many of you actually tried that? See?[00:38:34] Vibhu: I use it a lot. You? You work for MindsTV. I use it a lot.[00:38:41] Eugene Cheah: So, for some people that has used, and I think, I think that's the, that's might be, like, this is where my opinion starts to differ, because I think the big labs may have a bigger role in this, because Like, even for RWKB, even when we train non contacts, the reason why I say VRAM is a problem is that because when we did the, we need to backprop [00:39:00] against the states, we actually need to maintain the state in between the tokens by the token length.[00:39:05] Eugene Cheah: So that means we need to actually roll out the whole 1 million contacts if we are actually training 1 million. Which is the same for transformers, actually, but it just means we don't magically reuse the VRAM consumption in the training time space. So that is one of the VRAM bottlenecks, and I'm neither OpenAI nor Google, so donate GPUs if you have too much of them.[00:39:27] Eugene Cheah: But then, putting it back to another paradigm, right, is that I think O1 style reasoning might be actually pushing that direction downwards. In my opinion, this is my partial hot take is that if, let's say you have a super big model, And let's say you have a 70B model that may take double the tokens, but gets the same result.[00:39:51] Eugene Cheah: Strictly speaking, a 70B, and this is even for transformer or non transformer, right? We we'll take less less resources than that 400 B [00:40:00] model, even if it did double the amount thinking. And if that's the case, and we are still all trying to figure this out, maybe the direction for us is really getting the sub 200 B to be as fast as efficient as possible.[00:40:11] Eugene Cheah: We a very efficient architecture that some folks happen to be working on to, to just reason it out over larger and larger context thing.[00:40:20] Question: Yeah. One thing I'm super interested in is. Models that can watch forever? Obviously you cannot train something on infinite context length. How are y'all thinking about that, where you run on a much longer context length than is possible to train on?[00:40:38] Dan Fu: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. So I think when I think you guys probably had tweets along these lines, too. When we first started doing these things, because these are all recurrent models in theory you could just run it forever. You could just run it forever. And at the very least it won't, it won't like error out on your crash.[00:40:57] Dan Fu: There's another question of whether it can actually [00:41:00] use what it's seen in that infinite context. And I think there, so one place where probably the research and architectures ran faster Then another research is actually the benchmarks for long context. So you turn it on forever. You want to do everything or watch everything.[00:41:16] Dan Fu: What is it that you actually wanted to do? Can we actually build some benchmarks for that? Then measure what's happening. And then ask the question, can the models do it? Is there something else that they need? Yeah, I think that if I were to turn back the clock to 2022, that's probably one of the things I would have done differently, which would have been actually get some long context benchmarks out at the same time as we started pushing context length on all these models.[00:41:41] Eugene Cheah: I will also say the use case. So like, I think we both agree that there's no Infinite memory and the model needs to be able to learn and decide. I think what we have observed for, I think this also fits the state space model, is that one of the key advantages of this alternate attention mechanic that is not based on token position is that the model don't suddenly become crazy when you go past the [00:42:00] 8k training context tank, or a million context tank.[00:42:03] Eugene Cheah: It's actually still stable. It's still able to run, it's still able to rationalize. It just starts forgetting things. But some of these things are still there in latent memory. Some of these things are still somewhat there. That's the whole point of why reading twice works. Things like that. And one of the biggest pushes in this direction is that I think both Statespace and RWKB have Separate papers by other researchers where they use this architecture for time series data.[00:42:26] Eugene Cheah: Weather modeling. So, you are not asking what was the weather five days ago. You're asking what's the weather tomorrow based on the infinite length that we, as long as this Earth and the computer will keep running. So, so, and they found that it is like, better than existing, like, transformer or existing architecture in modeling this weather data.[00:42:47] Eugene Cheah: Control for the param size and stuff. I'm quite sure there are people with larger models. So, so there are things that, that in this case, right, there is future applications if your question is just what's next and not what's 10 years ago.[00:42:59] Dan Fu: Thanks so [00:43:00] much for having us. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all all our LS supporters who helped fund the gorgeous venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. Today, we're proud to share Loubna's highly anticipated talk (slides here)!Synthetic DataWe called out the Synthetic Data debate at last year's NeurIPS, and no surprise that 2024 was dominated by the rise of synthetic data everywhere:* Apple's Rephrasing the Web, Microsoft's Phi 2-4 and Orca/AgentInstruct, Tencent's Billion Persona dataset, DCLM, and HuggingFace's FineWeb-Edu, and Loubna's own Cosmopedia extended the ideas of synthetic textbook and agent generation to improve raw web scrape dataset quality* This year we also talked to the IDEFICS/OBELICS team at HuggingFace who released WebSight this year, the first work on code-vs-images synthetic data.* We called Llama 3.1 the Synthetic Data Model for its extensive use (and documentation!) of synthetic data in its pipeline, as well as its permissive license. * Nemotron CC and Nemotron-4-340B also made a big splash this year for how they used 20k items of human data to synthesize over 98% of the data used for SFT/PFT.* Cohere introduced Multilingual Arbitrage: Optimizing Data Pools to Accelerate Multilingual Progress observing gains of up to 56.5% improvement in win rates comparing multiple teachers vs the single best teacher model* In post training, AI2's Tülu3 (discussed by Luca in our Open Models talk) and Loubna's Smol Talk were also notable open releases this year.This comes in the face of a lot of scrutiny and criticism, with Scale AI as one of the leading voices publishing AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data in Nature magazine bringing mainstream concerns to the potential downsides of poor quality syndata:Part of the concerns we highlighted last year on low-background tokens are coming to bear: ChatGPT contaminated data is spiking in every possible metric:But perhaps, if Sakana's AI Scientist pans out this year, we will have mostly-AI AI researchers publishing AI research anyway so do we really care as long as the ideas can be verified to be correct?Smol ModelsMeta surprised many folks this year by not just aggressively updating Llama 3 and adding multimodality, but also adding a new series of “small” 1B and 3B “on device” models this year, even working on quantized numerics collaborations with Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Arm. It is near unbelievable that a 1B model today can qualitatively match a 13B model of last year:and the minimum size to hit a given MMLU bar has come down roughly 10x in the last year. We have been tracking this proxied by Lmsys Elo and inference price:The key reads this year are:* MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Cases* Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models* Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models* Loubna's SmolLM and SmolLM2: a family of state-of-the-art small models with 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters on the pareto efficiency frontier.* and Moondream, which we already covered in the 2024 in Vision talkFull Talk on YouTubeplease like and subscribe!Timestamps* [00:00:05] Loubna Intro* [00:00:33] The Rise of Synthetic Data Everywhere* [00:02:57] Model Collapse* [00:05:14] Phi, FineWeb, Cosmopedia - Synthetic Textbooks* [00:12:36] DCLM, Nemotron-CC* [00:13:28] Post Training - AI2 Tulu, Smol Talk, Cohere Multilingual Arbitrage* [00:16:17] Smol Models* [00:18:24] On Device Models* [00:22:45] Smol Vision Models* [00:25:14] What's NextTranscript2024 in Synthetic Data and Smol Models[00:00:00] ​[00:00:05] Loubna Intro[00:00:05] Speaker: ​I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. So I'm going to be talking about synthetic data in 2024. And then I'm going to be talking about small on device models. So I think the most interesting thing about synthetic data this year is that like now we have it everywhere in the large language models pipeline.[00:00:33] The Rise of Synthetic Data Everywhere[00:00:33] Speaker: I think initially, synthetic data was mainly used just for post training, because naturally that's the part where we needed human annotators. And then after that, we realized that we don't really have good benchmarks to [00:01:00] measure if models follow instructions well, if they are creative enough, or if they are chatty enough, so we also started using LLMs as judges.[00:01:08] Speaker: Thank you. And I think this year and towards the end of last year, we also went to the pre training parts and we started generating synthetic data for pre training to kind of replace some parts of the web. And the motivation behind that is that you have a lot of control over synthetic data. You can control your prompt and basically also the kind of data that you generate.[00:01:28] Speaker: So instead of just trying to filter the web, you could try to get the LLM to generate what you think the best web pages could look like and then train your models on that. So this is how we went from not having synthetic data at all in the LLM pipeline to having it everywhere. And so the cool thing is like today you can train an LLM with like an entirely synthetic pipeline.[00:01:49] Speaker: For example, you can use our Cosmopedia datasets and you can train a 1B model on like 150 billion tokens that are 100 percent synthetic. And those are also of good quality. And then you can [00:02:00] instruction tune the model on a synthetic SFT dataset. You can also do DPO on a synthetic dataset. And then to evaluate if the model is good, you can use.[00:02:07] Speaker: A benchmark that uses LLMs as a judge, for example, MTBench or AlpacaEvil. So I think this is like a really mind blowing because like just a few years ago, we wouldn't think this is possible. And I think there's a lot of concerns about model collapse, and I'm going to talk about that later. But we'll see that like, if we use synthetic data properly and we curate it carefully, that shouldn't happen.[00:02:29] Speaker: And the reason synthetic data is very popular right now is that we have really strong models, both open and closed. It is really cheap and fast to use compared to human annotations, which cost a lot and take a lot of time. And also for open models right now, we have some really good inference frameworks.[00:02:47] Speaker: So if you have enough GPUs, it's really easy to spawn these GPUs and generate like a lot of synthetic data. Some examples are VLM, TGI, and TensorRT.[00:02:57] Model Collapse[00:02:57] Speaker: Now let's talk about the elephant in the room, model [00:03:00] collapse. Is this the end? If you look at the media and all of like, for example, some papers in nature, it's really scary because there's a lot of synthetic data out there in the web.[00:03:09] Speaker: And naturally we train on the web. So we're going to be training a lot of synthetic data. And if model collapse is going to happen, we should really try to take that seriously. And the other issue is that, as I said, we think, a lot of people think the web is polluted because there's a lot of synthetic data.[00:03:24] Speaker: And for example, when we're building fine web datasets here at Guillerm and Hinek, we're interested in like, how much synthetic data is there in the web? So there isn't really a method to properly measure the amount of synthetic data or to save a webpage synthetic or not. But one thing we can do is to try to look for like proxy words, for example, expressions like as a large language model or words like delve that we know are actually generated by chat GPT.[00:03:49] Speaker: We could try to measure the amount of these words in our data system and compare them to the previous years. For example, here, we measured like a, these words ratio in different dumps of common crawl. [00:04:00] And we can see that like the ratio really increased after chat GPT's release. So if we were to say that synthetic data amount didn't change, you would expect this ratio to stay constant, which is not the case.[00:04:11] Speaker: So there's a lot of synthetic data probably on the web, but does this really make models worse? So what we did is we trained different models on these different dumps. And we then computed their performance on popular, like, NLP benchmarks, and then we computed the aggregated score. And surprisingly, you can see that the latest DOMs are actually even better than the DOMs that are before.[00:04:31] Speaker: So if there's some synthetic data there, at least it did not make the model's worse. Yeah, which is really encouraging. So personally, I wouldn't say the web is positive with Synthetic Data. Maybe it's even making it more rich. And the issue with like model collapse is that, for example, those studies, they were done at like a small scale, and you would ask the model to complete, for example, a Wikipedia paragraph, and then you would train it on these new generations, and you would do that every day.[00:04:56] Speaker: iteratively. I think if you do that approach, it's normal to [00:05:00] observe this kind of behavior because the quality is going to be worse because the model is already small. And then if you train it just on its generations, you shouldn't expect it to become better. But what we're really doing here is that we take a model that is very large and we try to distill its knowledge into a model that is smaller.[00:05:14] Phi, FineWeb, Cosmopedia - Synthetic Textbooks[00:05:14] Speaker: And in this way, you can expect to get like a better performance for your small model. And using synthetic data for pre-training has become really popular. After the textbooks are all you need papers where Microsoft basically trained a series of small models on textbooks that were using a large LLM.[00:05:32] Speaker: And then they found that these models were actually better than models that are much larger. So this was really interesting. It was like first of its time, but it was also met with a lot of skepticism, which is a good thing in research. It pushes you to question things because the dataset that they trained on was not public, so people were not really sure if these models are really good or maybe there's just some data contamination.[00:05:55] Speaker: So it was really hard to check if you just have the weights of the models. [00:06:00] And as Hugging Face, because we like open source, we tried to reproduce what they did. So this is our Cosmopedia dataset. We basically tried to follow a similar approach to what they documented in the paper. And we created a synthetic dataset of textbooks and blog posts and stories that had almost 30 billion tokens.[00:06:16] Speaker: And we tried to train some models on that. And we found that like the key ingredient to getting a good data set that is synthetic is trying as much as possible to keep it diverse. Because if you just throw the same prompts as your model, like generate like a textbook about linear algebra, and even if you change the temperature, the textbooks are going to look alike.[00:06:35] Speaker: So there's no way you could scale to like millions of samples. And the way you do that is by creating prompts that have some seeds that make them diverse. In our case, the prompt, we would ask the model to generate a textbook, but make it related to an extract from a webpage. And also we try to frame it within, to stay within topic.[00:06:55] Speaker: For example, here, we put like an extract about cardiovascular bioimaging, [00:07:00] and then we ask the model to generate a textbook related to medicine that is also related to this webpage. And this is a really nice approach because there's so many webpages out there. So you can. Be sure that your generation is not going to be diverse when you change the seed example.[00:07:16] Speaker: One thing that's challenging with this is that you want the seed samples to be related to your topics. So we use like a search tool to try to go all of fine web datasets. And then we also do a lot of experiments with the type of generations we want the model to generate. For example, we ask it for textbooks for middle school students or textbook for college.[00:07:40] Speaker: And we found that like some generation styles help on some specific benchmarks, while others help on other benchmarks. For example, college textbooks are really good for MMLU, while middle school textbooks are good for benchmarks like OpenBookQA and Pico. This is like a sample from like our search tool.[00:07:56] Speaker: For example, you have a top category, which is a topic, and then you have some [00:08:00] subtopics, and then you have the topic hits, which are basically the web pages in fine web does belong to these topics. And here you can see the comparison between Cosmopedia. We had two versions V1 and V2 in blue and red, and you can see the comparison to fine web, and as you can see throughout the training training on Cosmopedia was consistently better.[00:08:20] Speaker: So we managed to get a data set that was actually good to train these models on. It's of course so much smaller than FineWeb, it's only 30 billion tokens, but that's the scale that Microsoft data sets was, so we kind of managed to reproduce a bit what they did. And the data set is public, so everyone can go there, check if everything is all right.[00:08:38] Speaker: And now this is a recent paper from NVIDIA, Neumatron CC. They took things a bit further, and they generated not a few billion tokens, but 1. 9 trillion tokens, which is huge. And we can see later how they did that. It's more of, like, rephrasing the web. So we can see today that there's, like, some really huge synthetic datasets out there, and they're public, so, [00:09:00] like, you can try to filter them even further if you want to get, like, more high quality corpses.[00:09:04] Speaker: So for this, rephrasing the web this approach was suggested in this paper by Pratyush, where basically in this paper, they take some samples from C4 datasets, and then they use an LLM to rewrite these samples into a better format. For example, they ask an LLM to rewrite the sample into a Wikipedia passage or into a Q& A page.[00:09:25] Speaker: And the interesting thing in this approach is that you can use a model that is Small because it doesn't, rewriting doesn't require knowledge. It's just rewriting a page into a different style. So the model doesn't need to have like knowledge that is like extensive of what is rewriting compared to just asking a model to generate a new textbook and not giving it like ground truth.[00:09:45] Speaker: So here they rewrite some samples from C4 into Q& A, into Wikipedia, and they find that doing this works better than training just on C4. And so what they did in Nemo Trans CC is a similar approach. [00:10:00] They rewrite some pages from Common Crawl for two reasons. One is to, like improve Pages that are low quality, so they rewrite them into, for example, Wikipedia page, so they look better.[00:10:11] Speaker: And another reason is to create more diverse datasets. So they have a dataset that they already heavily filtered, and then they take these pages that are already high quality, and they ask the model to rewrite them in Question and Answer format. into like open ended questions or like multi choice questions.[00:10:27] Speaker: So this way they can reuse the same page multiple times without fearing like having multiple duplicates, because it's the same information, but it's going to be written differently. So I think that's also a really interesting approach for like generating synthetic data just by rephrasing the pages that you already have.[00:10:44] Speaker: There's also this approach called Prox where they try to start from a web page and then they generate a program which finds how to write that page to make it better and less noisy. For example, here you can see that there's some leftover metadata in the web page and you don't necessarily want to keep that for training [00:11:00] your model.[00:11:00] Speaker: So So they train a model that can generate programs that can like normalize and remove lines that are extra. So I think this approach is also interesting, but it's maybe less scalable than the approaches that I presented before. So that was it for like rephrasing and generating new textbooks.[00:11:17] Speaker: Another approach that I think is really good and becoming really popular for using synthetic data for pre training is basically building a better classifiers. For filtering the web for example, here we release the data sets called fine web edu. And the way we built it is by taking Llama3 and asking it to rate the educational content of web pages from zero to five.[00:11:39] Speaker: So for example, if a page is like a really good textbook that could be useful in a school setting, it would get a really high score. And if a page is just like an advertisement or promotional material, it would get a lower score. And then after that, we take these synthetic annotations and we train a classifier on them.[00:11:57] Speaker: It's a classifier like a BERT model. [00:12:00] And then we run this classifier on all of FineWeb, which is a 15 trillion tokens dataset. And then we only keep the pages that have like a score that's higher than 3. So for example, in our case, we went from 15 trillion tokens to 3. to just 1. 5 trillion tokens. Those are really highly educational.[00:12:16] Speaker: And as you can see here, a fine web EDU outperforms all the other public web datasets by a larger margin on a couple of benchmarks here, I show the aggregated score and you can see that this approach is really effective for filtering web datasets to get like better corpuses for training your LLMs.[00:12:36] DCLM, Nemotron-CC[00:12:36] Speaker: Others also try to do this approach. There's, for example, the DCLM datasets where they also train the classifier, but not to detect educational content. Instead, they trained it on OpenHermes dataset, which is a dataset for instruction tuning. And also they explain like IAM5 subreddits, and then they also get really high quality dataset which is like very information dense and can help [00:13:00] you train some really good LLMs.[00:13:01] Speaker: And then Nemotron Common Crawl, they also did this approach, but instead of using one classifier, they used an ensemble of classifiers. So they used, for example, the DCLM classifier, and also classifiers like the ones we used in FineWebEducational, and then they combined these two. Scores into a, with an ensemble method to only retain the best high quality pages, and they get a data set that works even better than the ones we develop.[00:13:25] Speaker: So that was it for like synthetic data for pre-training.[00:13:28] Post Training - AI2 Tulu, Smol Talk, Cohere Multilingual Arbitrage[00:13:28] Speaker: Now we can go back to post training. I think there's a lot of interesting post training data sets out there. One that was released recently, the agent instructs by Microsoft where they basically try to target some specific skills. And improve the performance of models on them.[00:13:43] Speaker: For example, here, you can see code, brain teasers, open domain QA, and they managed to get a dataset that outperforms that's when fine tuning Mistral 7b on it, it outperforms the original instruct model that was released by Mistral. And as I said, to get good synthetic data, you really [00:14:00] have to have a framework to make sure that your data is diverse.[00:14:03] Speaker: So for example, for them, they always. And then they see the generations on either source code or raw text documents, and then they rewrite them to make sure they're easier to generate instructions from, and then they use that for their like instruction data generation. There's also the Tool3SFT mixture, which was released recently by Allen AI.[00:14:23] Speaker: It's also really good quality and it covers a wide range of tasks. And the way they make sure that this dataset is diverse is by using personas from the persona hub datasets. Which is basically a data set of like I think over a million personas. And for example, in the tool mixture to generate like a new code snippet, they would give like the model persona, for example, a machine learning researcher interested in neural networks, and then ask it to generate like a coding problem.[00:14:49] Speaker: This way you make sure that your data set is really diverse, and then you can further filter the data sets, for example, using the reward models. We also released a dataset called Smalltalk, [00:15:00] and we also tried to cover the wide range of tasks, and as you can see here, for example, when fine tuning Mistral 7b on the dataset, we also outperformed the original Mistral instructs on a number of benchmarks, notably on mathematics and instruction following with ifevil.[00:15:18] Speaker: Another paper that's really interesting I wanted to mention is this one called Multilingual Data Arbitrage by Cohere. And basically they want to generate a data set for post training that is multilingual. And they have a really interesting problem. It's the fact that there isn't like one model that's really good at all the languages they wanted.[00:15:36] Speaker: So what they do is that like they use not just one teacher model, but multiple teachers. And then they have a router which basically sends the prompts they have to all these models. And then they get the completions and they have a reward model that traces all these generations and only keeps the best one.[00:15:52] Speaker: And this is like arbitrage and finance. So well, I think what's interesting in this, it shows that like synthetic data, it doesn't have to come from a single model. [00:16:00] And because we have so many good models now, you could like pull these models together and get like a dataset that's really high quality and that's diverse and that's covers all your needs.[00:16:12] Speaker: I was supposed to put a meme there, but. Yeah, so that was it for like a synthetic data.[00:16:17] Smol Models[00:16:17] Speaker: Now we can go to see what's happening in the small models field in 2024. I don't know if you know, but like now we have some really good small models. For example, Lama 3. 2 1B is. It matches Lama 2. 13b from, that was released last year on the LMSYS arena, which is basically the default go to leaderboard for evaluating models using human evaluation.[00:16:39] Speaker: And as you can see here, the scores of the models are really close. So I think we've made like hugely forward in terms of small models. Of course, that's one, just one data point, but there's more. For example, if you look at this chart from the Quint 2. 5 blog post, it shows that today we have some really good models that are only like 3 billion parameters [00:17:00] and 4 billion that score really high on MMLU.[00:17:03] Speaker: Which is a really popular benchmark for evaluating models. And you can see here that the red, the blue dots have more than 65 on MMLU. And the grey ones have less. And for example, Llama33b had less. So now we have a 3b model that outperforms a 33b model that was released earlier. So I think now people are starting to realize that like, we shouldn't just scale and scale models, but we should try to make them more efficient.[00:17:33] Speaker: I don't know if you knew, but you can also chat with a 3B plus model on your iPhone. For example, here, this is an app called PocketPal, where you can go and select a model from Hugging Face. It has a large choice. For example, here we loaded the 5. 3. 5, which is 3. 8 billion parameters on this iPhone. And we can chat with this and you can see that even the latency is also acceptable.[00:17:57] Speaker: For example, here, I asked it to give me a joke about [00:18:00] NeurIPS. So let's see what it has to say.[00:18:06] Speaker: Okay, why did the neural network attend NeurIPS? Because it heard there would be a lot of layers and fun and it wanted to train its sense of humor. So not very funny, but at least it can run on device. Yeah, so I think now we have good small models, but we also have like good frameworks and tools to use these small models.[00:18:24] On Device Models[00:18:24] Speaker: So I think we're really close to having like really on edge and on device models that are really good. And I think for a while we've had this narrative. But just training larger models is better. Of course, this is supported by science scaling laws. As you can see here, for example, when we scale the model size, the loss is lower and obviously you get a better model.[00:18:46] Speaker: But and we can see this, for example, in the GPT family of models, how we went from just a hundred million parameters to more than a trillion. parameters. And of course, we all observed the performance improvement when using the latest model. But [00:19:00] one thing that we shouldn't forget is that when we scale the model, we also scale the inference costs and time.[00:19:05] Speaker: And so the largest models were are going to cost so much more. So I think now instead of just building larger models, we should be focusing on building more efficient models. It's no longer a race for the largest models since these models are really expensive to run and they require like a really good infrastructure to do that and they cannot run on, for example, consumer hardware.[00:19:27] Speaker: And when you try to build more efficient models that match larger models, that's when you can really unlock some really interesting on device use cases. And I think a trend that we're noticing now is the trend of training smaller models longer. For example, if you compare how much, how long LLAMA was trained compared to LLAMA3, there is a huge increase in the pre training length.[00:19:50] Speaker: LLAMA was trained on 1 trillion tokens, but LLAMA3 8b was trained on 15 trillion tokens. So Meta managed to get a model that's the same size, but But it performs so much [00:20:00] better by choosing to like spend the sacrifice during training, because as we know, training is a one time cost, but inference is something that's ongoing.[00:20:08] Speaker: If we want to see what are like the small models reads in 2024, I think this mobile LLM paper by Meta is interesting. They try to study different models that are like have the less than 1 billion parameters and find which architecture makes most sense for these models. For example, they find that depth is more important than width.[00:20:29] Speaker: So it's more important to have models that have like more layers than just one. making them more wide. They also find that GQA helps, that tying the embedding helps. So I think it's a nice study overall for models that are just a few hundred million parameters. There's also the Apple intelligence tech report, which is interesting.[00:20:48] Speaker: So for Apple intelligence, they had two models, one that was like on server and another model that was on device. It had 3 billion parameters. And I think the interesting part is that they trained this model using [00:21:00] pruning. And then distillation. And for example, they have this table where they show that, like, using pruning and distillation works much better than training from scratch.[00:21:08] Speaker: And they also have some interesting insights about, like, how they specialize their models on specific tasks, like, for example, summarization and rewriting. There's also this paper by NVIDIA that was released recently. I think you've already had a talk about, like, hybrid models that was all interesting.[00:21:23] Speaker: And this model, they used, like, a hybrid architecture between state space models and transformers. And they managed to train a 1B model that's really performant without needing to train it on a lot of tokens. And regarding our work, we just recently released SmallM2, so it's a series of three models, which are the best in class in each model size.[00:21:46] Speaker: For example, our 1. 7b model outperforms Lama 1b and also Qt 2. 5. And how we managed to train this model is the following. That's where you spent a lot of time trying to curate the pre training datasets. We did a lot of [00:22:00] ablations, trying to find which datasets are good and also how to mix them. We also created some new math and code datasets that we're releasing soon.[00:22:08] Speaker: But you basically really spent a lot of time trying to find what's the best mixture that you can train these models on. And then we spent some time trying to like we also trained these models for very long. For example, small M1 was trained only on 1 trillion tokens, but this model is trained on 11 trillion tokens.[00:22:24] Speaker: And we saw that the performance kept improving. The models didn't really plateau mid training, which I think is really interesting. It shows that you can train such small models for very long and keep getting performance gains. What's interesting about SmallLM2 is that it's fully open. We also released, like the pre training code base, the fine tuning code, the datasets, and also evaluation in this repository.[00:22:45] Smol Vision Models[00:22:45] Speaker: Also there's, like, really interesting small models for text, but also for vision. For example, here you can see SmallVLM, which is a 2B model that's really efficient. It doesn't consume a lot of RAM, and it also has a good performance. There's also Moondream 0. [00:23:00] 5b, which was released recently. It's like the smallest visual language model.[00:23:04] Speaker: And as you can see, there isn't like a big trade off compared to Moondream 2b. So now I showed you that we have some really good small models. We also have the tools to use them, but why should you consider using small models and when? I think, like, small models are really interesting because of the on device feature.[00:23:23] Speaker: Because these models are small and they can run fast, you can basically run them on your laptop, but also on your mobile phone. And this means that your dataset stays locally. You don't have to send your queries to third parties. And this really enhances privacy. That was, for example, one of the big selling points for Apple Intelligence.[00:23:42] Speaker: Also, right now, we really have a lot of work to do. So many frameworks to do on device inference. For example, there's MLX, MLC, Llama, CPP, Transformers, JS. So we have a lot of options and each of them have like great features. So you have so many options for doing that. Small models are also really powerful if you choose to specialize them.[00:24:00][00:24:00] Speaker: For example, here there's a startup called Numind, which took small LM and then they fine tuned it on text extraction datasets. And they managed to get a model that's not very far from models that are much larger. So I think text extraction is like one use case where small models can be really performant and it makes sense to use them instead of just using larger models.[00:24:19] Speaker: You can also chat with these models in browser. For example, here, you can go there, you can load the model, you can even turn off your internet and just start chatting with the model locally. Speaking of text extraction, if you don't want to fine tune the models, there's a really good method of structure generation.[00:24:36] Speaker: We can basically force the models to follow a JSON schema that you defined. For example, here, we try to force the model to follow a schema for extracting key information from GitHub issues. So you can input free text, which is a complaint about a GitHub repository, something not working. And then you can run it there and the model can extract anything that is relevant for your GitHub issue creation.[00:24:58] Speaker: For example, the [00:25:00] priority, for example, here, priority is high, the type of the issue bug, and then a title and the estimation of how long this will take to fix. And you can just like do this in the browser, you can transform your text into a GitHub issue that's properly formatted.[00:25:14] What's Next[00:25:14] Speaker: So what's next for synthetic data and small models?[00:25:18] Speaker: I think that domain specific synthetic data is going to be, it's already important, it's going to be even more important. For example, generating synthetic data for math. I think this really would help improve the reasoning of a lot of models. And a lot of people are doing it, for example, Quint 2. 12 math, everyone's trying to reproduce a one.[00:25:37] Speaker: And so I think for synthetic data, trying to specialize it on some domains is going to be really important. And then for small models, I think specializing them through fine tuning, it's also going to be really important because I think a lot of companies are just trying to use these large models because they are better.[00:25:53] Speaker: But on some tasks, I think you can already get decent performance with small models. So you don't need to Pay like a [00:26:00] cost that's much larger just to make your model better at your task by a few percent. And this is not just for text. And I think it also applies for other modalities like vision and audio.[00:26:11] Speaker: And I think you should also watch out for on device frameworks and applications. For example, like the app I showed, or lama, all these frameworks are becoming really popular and I'm pretty sure that we're gonna get like more of them in 2025. And users really like that. Maybe for other, I should also say hot take.[00:26:28] Speaker: I think that like in AI, we just started like with fine tuning, for example, trying to make BERT work on some specific use cases, and really struggling to do that. And then we had some models that are much larger. So we just switched to like prompt engineering to get the models And I think we're going back to fine tuning where we realize these models are really costly.[00:26:47] Speaker: It's better to use just a small model or try to specialize it. So I think it's a little bit of a cycle and we're going to start to see like more fine tuning and less of just like a prompt engineering the models. So that was my talk. Thank you for following. And if you have [00:27:00] any questions, we can take them now. 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Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all our LS supporters who helped fund the venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.Since Nathan Lambert ( Interconnects ) joined us for the hit RLHF 201 episode at the start of this year, it is hard to overstate how much Open Models have exploded this past year. In 2023 only five names were playing in the top LLM ranks, Mistral, Mosaic's MPT, TII UAE's Falcon, Yi from Kai-Fu Lee's 01.ai, and of course Meta's Llama 1 and 2. This year a whole cast of new open models have burst on the scene, from Google's Gemma and Cohere's Command R, to Alibaba's Qwen and Deepseek models, to LLM 360 and DCLM and of course to the Allen Institute's OLMo, OL MOE, Pixmo, Molmo, and Olmo 2 models. We were honored to host Luca Soldaini, one of the research leads on the Olmo series of models at AI2.Pursuing Open Model research comes with a lot of challenges beyond just funding and access to GPUs and datasets, particularly the regulatory debates this year across Europe, California and the White House. We also were honored to hear from and Sophia Yang, head of devrel at Mistral, who also presented a great session at the AI Engineer World's Fair Open Models track!Full Talk on YouTubePlease like and subscribe!Timestamps* 00:00 Welcome to Latent Space Live * 00:12 Recap of 2024: Best Moments and Keynotes * 01:22 Explosive Growth of Open Models in 2024 * 02:04 Challenges in Open Model Research * 02:38 Keynote by Luca Soldani: State of Open Models * 07:23 Significance of Open Source AI Licenses * 11:31 Research Constraints and Compute Challenges * 13:46 Fully Open Models: A New Trend * 27:46 Mistral's Journey and Innovations * 32:57 Interactive Demo: Lachat Capabilities * 36:50 Closing Remarks and NetworkingTranscriptSession3Audio[00:00:00] AI Charlie: Welcome to Latent Space Live, our first mini conference held at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. This is Charlie, your AI co host. As a special treat this week, we're recapping the best of 2024 going domain by domain. We sent out a survey to the over 900 of you who told us what you wanted, and then invited the best speakers in the latent space network to cover each field.[00:00:28] AI Charlie: 200 of you joined us in person throughout the day, with over 2, 200 watching live online. Our next keynote covers the state of open models in 2024, with Luca Soldani and Nathan Lambert of the Allen Institute for AI, with a special appearance from Dr. Sophia Yang of Mistral. Our first hit episode of 2024 was with Nathan Lambert on RLHF 201 back in January.[00:00:57] AI Charlie: Where he discussed both reinforcement learning for language [00:01:00] models and the growing post training and mid training stack with hot takes on everything from constitutional AI to DPO to rejection sampling and also previewed the sea change coming to the Allen Institute. And to Interconnects, his incredible substack on the technical aspects of state of the art AI training.[00:01:18] AI Charlie: We highly recommend subscribing to get access to his Discord as well. It is hard to overstate how much open models have exploded this past year. In 2023, only five names were playing in the top LLM ranks. Mistral, Mosaics MPT, and Gatsby. TII UAE's Falcon, Yi, from Kaifu Lee's 01. ai, And of course, Meta's Lama 1 and 2.[00:01:43] AI Charlie: This year, a whole cast of new open models have burst on the scene. From Google's Jemma and Cohere's Command R, To Alibaba's Quen and DeepSeq models, to LLM360 and DCLM, and of course, to the Allen Institute's OLMO, [00:02:00] OLMOE, PIXMO, MOLMO, and OLMO2 models. Pursuing open model research comes with a lot of challenges beyond just funding and access to GPUs and datasets, particularly the regulatory debates this year across Europe.[00:02:14] AI Charlie: California and the White House. We also were honored to hear from Mistral, who also presented a great session at the AI Engineer World's Fair Open Models track. As always, don't forget to check the show notes for the YouTube link to their talk, as well as their slides. Watch out and take care.[00:02:35] Luca Intro[00:02:35] Luca Soldaini: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me over. I'm Luca. I'm a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. I threw together a few slides on sort of like a recap of like interesting themes in open models for, for 2024. Have about maybe 20, 25 minutes of slides, and then we can chat if there are any questions.[00:02:57] Luca Soldaini: If I can advance to the next slide. [00:03:00] Okay, cool. So I did the quick check of like, to sort of get a sense of like, how much 2024 was different from 2023. So I went on Hugging Face and sort of get, tried to get a picture of what kind of models were released in 2023 and like, what do we get in 2024?[00:03:16] Luca Soldaini: 2023 we get, we got things like both LLAMA 1 and 2, we got Mistral, we got MPT, Falcon models, I think the YI model came in at the end. Tail end of the year. It was a pretty good year. But then I did the same for 2024. And it's actually quite stark difference. You have models that are, you know, reveling frontier level.[00:03:38] Luca Soldaini: Performance of what you can get from closed models from like Quen, from DeepSeq. We got Llama3. We got all sorts of different models. I added our own Olmo at the bottom. There's this growing group of like, Fully open models that I'm going to touch on a little bit later. But you know, just looking at the slides, it feels like 2024 [00:04:00] was just smooth sailing, happy knees, much better than previous year.[00:04:04] Luca Soldaini: And you know, you can plot you can pick your favorite benchmark Or least favorite, I don't know, depending on what point you're trying to make. And plot, you know, your closed model, your open model and sort of spin it in ways that show that, oh, you know open models are much closer to where closed models are today versus to Versus last year where the gap was fairly significant.[00:04:29] Luca Soldaini: So one thing that I think I don't know if I have to convince people in this room, but usually when I give this talks about like open models, there is always like this background question in, in, in people's mind of like, why should we use open models? APIs argument, you know, it's, it's. Just an HTTP request to get output from a, from one of the best model out there.[00:04:53] Luca Soldaini: Why do I have to set up infra and use local models? And there are really like two answer. There is the more [00:05:00] researchy answer for this, which is where it might be. Background lays, which is just research. If you want to do research on language models, research thrives on, on open models, there is like large swath of research on modeling, on how these models behave on evaluation and inference on mechanistic interpretability that could not happen at all if you didn't have open models they're also for AI builders, they're also like.[00:05:30] Luca Soldaini: Good use cases for using local models. You know, you have some, this is like a very not comprehensive slides, but you have things like there are some application where local models just blow closed models out of the water. So like retrieval, it's a very clear example. We might have like constraints like Edge AI applications where it makes sense.[00:05:51] Luca Soldaini: But even just like in terms of like stability, being able to say this model is not changing under the hood. It's, there's plenty of good cases for, [00:06:00] for open models. And the community is just not models. Is I stole this slide from one of the Quent2 announcement blog posts. But it's super cool to see like how much tech exists around open models and serving them on making them efficient and hosting them.[00:06:18] Luca Soldaini: It's pretty cool. And so. It's if you think about like where the term opens come from, comes from like the open source really open models meet the core tenants of, of open, of open source specifically when it comes around collaboration, there is truly a spirit, like through these open models, you can build on top of other people.[00:06:41] Luca Soldaini: innovation. We see a lot of these even in our own work of like, you know, as we iterate in the various versions of Alma it's not just like every time we collect from scratch all the data. No, the first step is like, okay, what are the cool data sources and datasets people have put [00:07:00] together for language model for training?[00:07:01] Luca Soldaini: Or when it comes to like our post training pipeline We one of the steps is you want to do some DPO and you use a lot of outputs of other models to improve your, your preference model. So it's really having like an open sort of ecosystem benefits and accelerates the development of open models.[00:07:23] The Definition of Open Models[00:07:23] Luca Soldaini: One thing that we got in 2024, which is not a specific model, but I thought it was really significant, is we first got we got our first open source AI definition. So this is from the open source initiative they've been generally the steward of a lot of the open source licenses when it comes to software and so they embarked on this journey in trying to figure out, okay, How does a license, an open source license for a model look like?[00:07:52] Luca Soldaini: Majority of the work is very dry because licenses are dry. So I'm not going to walk through the license step by [00:08:00] step, but I'm just going to pick out one aspect that is very good and then one aspect that personally feels like it needs improvement on the good side. This this open source AI license actually.[00:08:13] Luca Soldaini: This is very intuitive. If you ever build open source software and you have some expectation around like what open source looks like for software for, for AI, sort of matches your intuition. So, the weights need to be fairly available the code must be released with an open source license and there shouldn't be like license clauses that block specific use cases.[00:08:39] Luca Soldaini: So. Under this definition, for example, LLAMA or some of the QUEN models are not open source because the license says you can't use this model for this or it says if you use this model you have to name the output this way or derivative needs to be named that way. Those clauses don't meet open source [00:09:00] definition and so they will not be covered.[00:09:02] Luca Soldaini: The LLAMA license will not be covered under the open source definition. It's not perfect. One of the thing that, um, internally, you know, in discussion with with OSI, we were sort of disappointed is around the language. For data. So you might imagine that an open source AI model means a model where the data is freely available.[00:09:26] Luca Soldaini: There were discussion around that, but at the end of the day, they decided to go with a softened stance where they say a model is open source if you provide sufficient detail information. On how to sort of replicate the data pipeline. So you have an equivalent system, sufficient, sufficiently detailed.[00:09:46] Luca Soldaini: It's very, it's very fuzzy. Don't like that. An equivalent system is also very fuzzy. And this doesn't take into account the accessibility of the process, right? It might be that you provide enough [00:10:00] information, but this process costs, I don't know, 10 million to do. Now the open source definition. Like, any open source license has never been about accessibility, so that's never a factor in open source software, how accessible software is.[00:10:14] Luca Soldaini: I can make a piece of open source, put it on my hard drive, and never access it. That software is still open source, the fact that it's not widely distributed doesn't change the license, but practically there are expectations of like, what we want good open sources to be. So, it's, It's kind of sad to see that the data component in this license is not as, as, Open as some of us would like would like it to be.[00:10:40] Challenges for Open Models[00:10:40] Luca Soldaini: and I linked a blog post that Nathan wrote on the topic that it's less rambly and easier to follow through. One thing that in general, I think it's fair to say about the state of open models in 2024 is that we know a lot more than what we knew in, [00:11:00] in 2023. Like both on the training data, like And the pre training data you curate on like how to do like all the post training, especially like on the RL side.[00:11:10] Luca Soldaini: You know, 2023 was a lot of like throwing random darts at the board. I think 2024, we have clear recipes that, okay, don't get the same results as a closed lab because there is a cost in, in actually matching what they do. But at least we have a good sense of like, okay, this is, this is the path to get state of the art language model.[00:11:31] Luca Soldaini: I think that one thing that it's a downside of 2024 is that I think we are more research constrained in 2023. It feels that, you know, the barrier for compute that you need to, to move innovation along as just being right rising and rising. So like, if you go back to this slide, there is now this, this cluster of models that are sort of released by the.[00:11:57] Luca Soldaini: Compute rich club. Membership is [00:12:00] hotly debated. You know, some people don't want to be. Called the rich because it comes to expectations. Some people want to be called rich, but I don't know, there's debate, but like, these are players that have, you know, 10, 000, 50, 000 GPUs at minimum. And so they can do a lot of work and a lot of exploration and improving models that it's not very accessible.[00:12:21] Luca Soldaini: To give you a sense of like how I personally think about. Research budget for each part of the, of the language model pipeline is like on the pre training side, you can maybe do something with a thousand GPUs, really you want 10, 000. And like, if you want real estate of the art, you know, your deep seek minimum is like 50, 000 and you can scale to infinity.[00:12:44] Luca Soldaini: The more you have, the better it gets. Everyone on that side still complains that they don't have enough GPUs. Post training is a super wide sort of spectrum. You can do as little with like eight GPUs as long as you're able to [00:13:00] run, you know, a good version of, say, a LLAMA model, you can do a lot of work there.[00:13:05] Luca Soldaini: You can scale a lot of the methodology, just like scales with compute, right? If you're interested in you know, your open replication of what OpenAI's O1 is you're going to be on the 10K spectrum of our GPUs. Inference, you can do a lot with very few resources. Evaluation, you can do a lot with, well, I should say at least one GPUs if you want to evaluate GPUs.[00:13:30] Luca Soldaini: Open models but in general, like if you are, if you care a lot about intervention to do on this model, which it's my prefer area of, of research, then, you know, the resources that you need are quite, quite significant. Yeah. One other trends that has emerged in 2024 is this cluster of fully open models.[00:13:54] Luca Soldaini: So Omo the model that we built at ai, two being one of them and you know, it's nice [00:14:00] that it's not just us. There's like a cluster of other mostly research efforts who are working on this. And so it's good to to give you a primer of what like fully open means. So fully open, the easy way to think about it is instead of just releasing a model checkpoint that you run, you release a full recipe so that other people working on it.[00:14:24] Luca Soldaini: Working on that space can pick and choose whatever they want from your recipe and create their own model or improve on top of your model. You're giving out the full pipeline and all the details there instead of just like the end output. So I pull up the screenshot from our recent MOE model.[00:14:43] Luca Soldaini: And like for this model, for example, we released the model itself. Data that was trained on, the code, both for training and inference all the logs that we got through the training run, as well as every intermediate checkpoint and like the fact that you release different part of the pipeline [00:15:00] allows others to do really cool things.[00:15:02] Luca Soldaini: So for example, this tweet from early this year from folks in news research they use our pre training data to do a replication of the BitNet paper in the open. So they took just a Really like the initial part of a pipeline and then the, the thing on top of it. It goes both ways.[00:15:21] Luca Soldaini: So for example, for the Olmo2 model a lot of our pre trained data for the first stage of pre training was from this DCLM initiative that was led by folks Ooh, a variety of ins a variety of institutions. It was a really nice group effort. But you know, for When it was nice to be able to say, okay, you know, the state of the art in terms of like what is done in the open has improved.[00:15:46] AI2 Models - Olmo, Molmo, Pixmo etc[00:15:46] Luca Soldaini: We don't have to like do all this work from scratch to catch up the state of the art. We can just take it directly and integrate it and do our own improvements on top of that. I'm going to spend a few minutes doing like a [00:16:00] shameless plug for some of our fully open recipes. So indulge me in this.[00:16:05] Luca Soldaini: So a few things that we released this year was, as I was mentioning, there's OMOE model which is, I think still is state of the art MOE model in its size class. And it's also. Fully open, so every component of this model is available. We released a multi modal model called Molmo. Molmo is not just a model, but it's a full recipe of how you go from a text only model to a multi modal model, and we apply this recipe on top of Quent checkpoints, on top of Olmo checkpoints, as well as on top of OlmoE.[00:16:37] Luca Soldaini: And I think there'd be a replication doing that on top of Mistral as well. The post training side we recently released 2. 0. 3. Same story. This is a recipe on how you go from a base model to A state of the art post training model. We use the Tulu recipe on top of Olmo, on top of Llama, and then there's been open replication effort [00:17:00] to do that on top of Quen as well.[00:17:02] Luca Soldaini: It's really nice to see like, you know, when your recipe sort of, it's kind of turnkey, you can apply it to different models and it kind of just works. And finally, the last thing we released this year was Olmo 2, which so far is the best state of the art. Fully open language model a Sera combines aspect from all three of these previous models.[00:17:22] Luca Soldaini: What we learn on the data side from MomoE and what we learn on like making models that are easy to adapt from the Momo project and the Tulu project. I will close with a little bit of reflection of like ways this, this ecosystem of open models like it's not all roses. It's not all happy. It feels like day to day, it's always in peril.[00:17:44] Luca Soldaini: And, you know, I talked a little bit about like the compute issues that come with it. But it's really not just compute. One thing that is on top of my mind is due to like the environment and how you know, growing feelings about like how AI is treated. [00:18:00] It's actually harder to get access to a lot of the data that was used to train a lot of the models up to last year.[00:18:06] Luca Soldaini: So this is a screenshot from really fabulous work from Shane Longpre who's, I think is in Europe about Just access of like diminishing access to data for language model pre training. So what they did is they went through every snapshot of common crawl. Common crawl is this publicly available scrape of the, of a subset of the internet.[00:18:29] Luca Soldaini: And they looked at how For any given website whether a website that was accessible in say 2017, what, whether it was accessible or not in 2024. And what they found is as a reaction to like the close like of the existence of closed models like OpenAI or Cloud GPT or Cloud a lot of content owners have blanket Blocked any type of crawling to your website.[00:18:57] Luca Soldaini: And this is something that we see also internally at [00:19:00] AI2. Like one project that we started this year is we wanted to, we wanted to understand, like, if you're a good citizen of the internet and you crawl following sort of norms and policy that have been established in the last 25 years, what can you crawl?[00:19:17] Luca Soldaini: And we found that there's a lot of website where. The norms of how you express preference of whether to crawl your data or not are broken. A lot of people would block a lot of crawling, but do not advertise that in RobustDXT. You can only tell that they're crawling, that they're blocking you in crawling when you try doing it.[00:19:37] Luca Soldaini: Sometimes you can't even crawl the robots. txt to, to check whether you're allowed or not. And then a lot of websites there's, there's like all these technologies that historically have been, have existed to make websites serving easier such as Cloudflare or DNS. They're now being repurposed for blocking AI or any type of crawling [00:20:00] in a way that is Very opaque to the content owners themselves.[00:20:04] Luca Soldaini: So, you know, you go to these websites, you try to access them and they're not available and you get a feeling it's like, Oh, someone changed, something changed on the, on the DNS side that it's blocking this and likely the content owner has no idea. They're just using a Cloudflare for better, you know, load balancing.[00:20:25] Luca Soldaini: And this is something that was sort of sprung on them with very little notice. And I think the problem is this, this blocking or ideas really, it impacts people in different ways. It disproportionately helps companies that have a headstart, which are usually the closed labs and it hurts incoming newcomer players where either have now to do things in a sketchy way or you're never going to get that content that the closed lab might have.[00:20:54] Luca Soldaini: So there's a lot, it was a lot of coverage. I'm going to plug Nathan's blog post again. That is, [00:21:00] that I think the title of this one is very succinct which is like, we're actually not, You know, before thinking about running out of training data, we're actually running out of open training data. And so if we want better open models they should be on top of our mind.[00:21:13] Regulation and Lobbying[00:21:13] Luca Soldaini: The other thing that has emerged is that there is strong lobbying efforts on trying to define any kind of, AI as like a new extremely risky and I want to be precise here. Like the problem is now, um, like the problem is not not considering the risk of this technology. Every technology has risks that, that should always be considered.[00:21:37] Luca Soldaini: The thing that it's like to me is sorry, is ingenious is like just putting this AI on a pedestal and calling it like, An unknown alien technology that has like new and undiscovered potentials to destroy humanity. When in reality, all the dangers I think are rooted in [00:22:00] dangers that we know from existing software industry or existing issues that come with when using software on on a lot of sensitive domains, like medical areas.[00:22:13] Luca Soldaini: And I also noticed a lot of efforts that have actually been going on and trying to make this open model safe. I pasted one here from AI2, but there's actually like a lot of work that has been going on on like, okay, how do you make, if you're distributing this model, Openly, how do you make it safe?[00:22:31] Luca Soldaini: How, what's the right balance between accessibility on open models and safety? And then also there's annoying brushing of sort of concerns that are then proved to be unfounded under the rug. You know, if you remember the beginning of this year, it was all about bio risk of these open models.[00:22:48] Luca Soldaini: The whole thing fizzled because as being Finally, there's been like rigorous research, not just this paper from Cohere folks, but it's been rigorous research showing [00:23:00] that this is really not a concern that we should be worried about. Again, there is a lot of dangerous use of AI applications, but this one was just like, A lobbying ploy to just make things sound scarier than they actually are.[00:23:15] Luca Soldaini: So I got to preface this part. It says, this is my personal opinion. It's not my employer, but I look at things like the SP 1047 from, from California. And I think we kind of dodged a bullet on, on this legislation. We, you know, the open source community, a lot of the community came together at the last, sort of the last minute and did a very good effort trying to explain all the negative impact of this bill.[00:23:43] Luca Soldaini: But There's like, I feel like there's a lot of excitement on building these open models or like researching on these open models. And lobbying is not sexy it's kind of boring but it's sort of necessary to make sure that this ecosystem can, can really [00:24:00] thrive. This end of presentation, I have Some links, emails, sort of standard thing in case anyone wants to reach out and if folks have questions or anything they wanted to discuss.[00:24:13] Luca Soldaini: Is there an open floor? I think we have Sophia[00:24:16] swyx: who wants to who one, one very important open model that we haven't covered is Mistral. Ask her on this slide. Yeah, yeah. Well, well, it's nice to have the Mistral person talk recap the year in Mistral. But while Sophia gets set up, does anyone have like, just thoughts or questions about the progress in this space?[00:24:32] Questions - Incentive Alignment[00:24:32] swyx: Do you always have questions?[00:24:34] Quesiton: I'm very curious how we should build incentives to build open models, things like Francois Chollet's ArcPrize, and other initiatives like that. What is your opinion on how we should better align incentives in the community so that open models stay open?[00:24:49] Luca Soldaini: The incentive bit is, like, really hard.[00:24:51] Luca Soldaini: Like, even It's something that I actually, even we think a lot about it internally because like building open models is risky. [00:25:00] It's very expensive. And so people don't want to take risky bets. I think the, definitely like the challenges like our challenge, I think those are like very valid approaches for it.[00:25:13] Luca Soldaini: And then I think in general, promoting, building, so, any kind of effort to participate in this challenge, in those challenges, if we can promote doing that on top of open models and sort of really lean into like this multiplier effect, I think that is a good way to go. If there were more money for that.[00:25:35] Luca Soldaini: For efforts like research efforts around open models. There's a lot of, I think there's a lot of investments in companies that at the moment are releasing their model in the open, which is really cool. But it's usually more because of commercial interest and not wanting to support this, this like open models in the longterm, it's a really hard problem because I think everyone is operating sort of [00:26:00] in what.[00:26:01] Luca Soldaini: Everyone is at their local maximum, right? In ways that really optimize their position on the market. Global maximum is harder to achieve.[00:26:11] Question2: Can I ask one question? No.[00:26:12] Luca Soldaini: Yeah.[00:26:13] Question2: So I think one of the gap between the closed and open source models is the mutability. So the closed source models like chat GPT works pretty good on the low resource languages, which is not the same on the open, open source models, right?[00:26:27] Question2: So is it in your plan to improve on that?[00:26:32] Luca Soldaini: I think in general,[00:26:32] Luca Soldaini: yes, is I think it's. I think we'll see a lot of improvements there in, like, 2025. Like, there's groups like, Procurement English on the smaller side that are already working on, like, better crawl support, multilingual support. I think what I'm trying to say here is you really want to be experts.[00:26:54] Luca Soldaini: who are actually in those countries that teach those languages to [00:27:00] participate in the international community. To give you, like, a very easy example I'm originally from Italy. I think I'm terribly equipped to build a model that works well in Italian. Because one of the things you need to be able to do is having that knowledge of, like, okay, how do I access, you know, how Libraries, or content that is from this region that covers this language.[00:27:23] Luca Soldaini: I've been in the US long enough that I no longer know. So, I think that's the efforts that folks in Central Europe, for example, are doing. Around like, okay, let's tap into regional communities. To get access you know, to bring in collaborators from those areas. I think it's going to be, like, very crucial for getting products there.[00:27:46] Mistral intro[00:27:46] Sophia Yang: Hi everyone. Yeah, I'm super excited to be here to talk to you guys about Mistral. A really short and quick recap of what we have done, what kind of models and products we have released in the [00:28:00] past year and a half. So most of you We have already known that we are a small startup funded about a year and a half ago in Paris in May, 2003, it was funded by three of our co founders, and in September, 2003, we released our first open source model, Mistral 7b yeah, how, how many of you have used or heard about Mistral 7b?[00:28:24] Sophia Yang: Hey, pretty much everyone. Thank you. Yeah, it's our Pretty popular and community. Our committee really loved this model, and in December 23, we, we released another popular model with the MLE architecture Mr. A X seven B and oh. Going into this year, you can see we have released a lot of things this year.[00:28:46] Sophia Yang: First of all, in February 2004, we released MrSmall, MrLarge, LeChat, which is our chat interface, I will show you in a little bit. We released an embedding model for, you [00:29:00] know, converting your text into embedding vectors, and all of our models are available. The, the big cloud resources. So you can use our model on Google cloud, AWS, Azure Snowflake, IBM.[00:29:16] Sophia Yang: So very useful for enterprise who wants to use our model through cloud. And in April and May this year, we released another powerful open source MOE model, AX22B. And we also released our first code. Code Model Coastal, which is amazing at 80 plus languages. And then we provided another fine tuning service for customization.[00:29:41] Sophia Yang: So because we know the community love to fine tune our models, so we provide you a very nice and easy option for you to fine tune our model on our platform. And also we released our fine tuning code base called Menstrual finetune. It's open source, so feel free to take it. Take a look and.[00:29:58] Sophia Yang: More models. [00:30:00] On July 2, November this year, we released many, many other models. First of all is the two new small, best small models. We have Minestra 3B great for Deploying on edge devices we have Minstrel 8B if you used to use Minstrel 7B, Minstrel 8B is a great replacement with much stronger performance than Minstrel 7B.[00:30:25] Sophia Yang: We also collaborated with NVIDIA and open sourced another model, Nemo 12B another great model. And Just a few weeks ago, we updated Mistral Large with the version 2 with the updated, updated state of the art features and really great function calling capabilities. It's supporting function calling in LatentNate.[00:30:45] Sophia Yang: And we released two multimodal models Pixtral 12b. It's this open source and Pixtral Large just amazing model for, models for not understanding images, but also great at text understanding. So. Yeah, a [00:31:00] lot of the image models are not so good at textual understanding, but pixel large and pixel 12b are good at both image understanding and textual understanding.[00:31:09] Sophia Yang: And of course, we have models for research. Coastal Mamba is built on Mamba architecture and MathRoll, great with working with math problems. So yeah, that's another model.[00:31:29] Sophia Yang: Here's another view of our model reference. We have several premier models, which means these models are mostly available through our API. I mean, all of the models are available throughout our API, except for Ministry 3B. But for the premier model, they have a special license. Minstrel research license, you can use it for free for exploration, but if you want to use it for enterprise for production use, you will need to purchase a license [00:32:00] from us.[00:32:00] Sophia Yang: So on the top row here, we have Minstrel 3b and 8b as our premier model. Minstrel small for best, best low latency use cases, MrLarge is great for your most sophisticated use cases. PixelLarge is the frontier class multimodal model. And, and we have Coastral for great for coding and then again, MrEmbedding model.[00:32:22] Sophia Yang: And The bottom, the bottom of the slides here, we have several Apache 2. 0 licensed open way models. Free for the community to use, and also if you want to fine tune it, use it for customization, production, feel free to do so. The latest, we have Pixtros 3 12b. We also have Mr. Nemo mum, Coastal Mamba and Mastro, as I mentioned, and we have three legacy models that we don't update anymore.[00:32:49] Sophia Yang: So we recommend you to move to our newer models if you are still using them. And then, just a few weeks ago, [00:33:00] we did a lot of, uh, improvements to our code interface, Lachette. How many of you have used Lachette? Oh, no. Only a few. Okay. I highly recommend Lachette. It's chat. mistral. ai. It's free to use.[00:33:16] Sophia Yang: It has all the amazing capabilities I'm going to show you right now. But before that, Lachette in French means cat. So this is actually a cat logo. If you You can tell this is the cat eyes. Yeah. So first of all, I want to show you something Maybe let's, let's take a look at image understanding.[00:33:36] Sophia Yang: So here I have a receipts and I want to ask, just going to get the prompts. Cool. So basically I have a receipt and I said I ordered I don't know. Coffee and the sausage. How much do I owe? Add a 18 percent tip. So hopefully it was able to get the cost of the coffee and the [00:34:00] sausage and ignore the other things.[00:34:03] Sophia Yang: And yeah, I don't really understand this, but I think this is coffee. It's yeah. Nine, eight. And then cost of the sausage, we have 22 here. And then it was able to add the cost, calculate the tip, and all that. Great. So, it's great at image understanding, it's great at OCR tasks. So, if you have OCR tasks, please use it.[00:34:28] Sophia Yang: It's free on the chat. It's also available through our API. And also I want to show you a Canvas example. A lot of you may have used Canvas with other tools before. But, With Lachat, it's completely free again. Here, I'm asking it to create a canvas that's used PyScript to execute Python in my browser.[00:34:51] Sophia Yang: Let's see if it works. Import this. Okay, so, yeah, so basically it's executing [00:35:00] Python here. Exactly what we wanted. And the other day, I was trying to ask Lachat to create a game for me. Let's see if we can make it work. Yeah, the Tetris game. Yep. Let's just get one row. Maybe. Oh no. Okay. All right. You get the idea. I failed my mission. Okay. Here we go. Yay! Cool. Yeah. So as you can see, Lachet can write, like, a code about a simple game pretty easily. And you can ask Lachet to explain the code. Make updates however you like. Another example. There is a bar here I want to move.[00:35:48] Sophia Yang: Okay, great, okay. And let's go back to another one. Yeah, we also have web search capabilities. Like, you can [00:36:00] ask what's the latest AI news. Image generation is pretty cool. Generate an image about researchers. Okay. In Vancouver? Yeah, it's Black Forest Labs flux Pro. Again, this is free, so Oh, cool.[00:36:19] Sophia Yang: I guess researchers here are mostly from University of British Columbia. That's smart. Yeah. So this is Laia ira. Please feel free to use it. And let me know if you have any feedback. We're always looking for improvement and we're gonna release a lot more powerful features in the coming years.[00:36:37] Sophia Yang: Thank you. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024! We want to express our deepest appreciation to event sponsors AWS, Daylight Computer, Thoth.ai, StrongCompute, Notable Capital, and most of all all our LS supporters who helped fund the gorgeous venue and A/V production!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.The single most requested domain was computer vision, and we could think of no one better to help us recap 2024 than our friends at Roboflow, who was one of our earliest guests in 2023 and had one of this year's top episodes in 2024 again. Roboflow has since raised a $40m Series B!LinksTheir slides are here:All the trends and papers they picked:* Isaac Robinson* Sora (see our Video Diffusion pod) - extending diffusion from images to video* SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos (see our SAM2 pod) - extending prompted masks to full video object segmentation* DETR Dominancy: DETRs show Pareto improvement over YOLOs* RT-DETR: DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection* LW-DETR: A Transformer Replacement to YOLO for Real-Time Detection* D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement* Peter Robicheaux* MMVP (Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs)* * Florence 2 (Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks) * PalíGemma / PaliGemma 2* PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer* PaliGemma 2: A Family of Versatile VLMs for Transfer* AlMv2 (Multimodal Autoregressive Pre-training of Large Vision Encoders) * Vik Korrapati - MoondreamFull Talk on YouTubeWant more content like this? Like and subscribe to stay updated on our latest talks, interviews, and podcasts.Transcript/Timestamps[00:00:00] Intro[00:00:05] AI Charlie: welcome to Latent Space Live, our first mini conference held at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. This is Charlie, your AI co host. When we were thinking of ways to add value to our academic conference coverage, we realized that there was a lack of good talks, just recapping the best of 2024, going domain by domain.[00:00:36] AI Charlie: We sent out a survey to the over 900 of you. who told us what you wanted, and then invited the best speakers in the Latent Space Network to cover each field. 200 of you joined us in person throughout the day, with over 2, 200 watching live online. Our second featured keynote is The Best of Vision 2024, with Peter Robichaud and Isaac [00:01:00] Robinson of Roboflow, with a special appearance from Vic Corrapati of Moondream.[00:01:05] AI Charlie: When we did a poll of our attendees, the highest interest domain of the year was vision. And so our first port of call was our friends at Roboflow. Joseph Nelson helped us kickstart our vision coverage in episode 7 last year, and this year came back as a guest host with Nikki Ravey of Meta to cover segment Anything 2.[00:01:25] AI Charlie: Roboflow have consistently been the leaders in open source vision models and tooling. With their SuperVision library recently eclipsing PyTorch's Vision library. And Roboflow Universe hosting hundreds of thousands of open source vision datasets and models. They have since announced a 40 million Series B led by Google Ventures.[00:01:46] AI Charlie: Woohoo.[00:01:48] Isaac's picks[00:01:48] Isaac Robinson: Hi, we're Isaac and Peter from Roboflow, and we're going to talk about the best papers of 2024 in computer vision. So, for us, we defined best as what made [00:02:00] the biggest shifts in the space. And to determine that, we looked at what are some major trends that happened and what papers most contributed to those trends.[00:02:09] Isaac Robinson: So I'm going to talk about a couple trends, Peter's going to talk about a trend, And then we're going to hand it off to Moondream. So, the trends that I'm interested in talking about are These are a major transition from models that run on per image basis to models that run using the same basic ideas on video.[00:02:28] Isaac Robinson: And then also how debtors are starting to take over the real time object detection scene from the YOLOs, which have been dominant for years.[00:02:37] Sora, OpenSora and Video Vision vs Generation[00:02:37] Isaac Robinson: So as a highlight we're going to talk about Sora, which from my perspective is the biggest paper of 2024, even though it came out in February. Is the what?[00:02:48] Isaac Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. So just it's a, SORA is just a a post. So I'm going to fill it in with details from replication efforts, including open SORA and related work, such as a stable [00:03:00] diffusion video. And then we're also going to talk about SAM2, which applies the SAM strategy to video. And then how debtors, These are the improvements in 2024 to debtors that are making them a Pareto improvement to YOLO based models.[00:03:15] Isaac Robinson: So to start this off, we're going to talk about the state of the art of video generation at the end of 2023, MagVIT MagVIT is a discrete token, video tokenizer akin to VQ, GAN, but applied to video sequences. And it actually outperforms state of the art handcrafted video compression frameworks.[00:03:38] Isaac Robinson: In terms of the bit rate versus human preference for quality and videos generated by autoregressing on these discrete tokens generate some pretty nice stuff, but up to like five seconds length and, you know, not super detailed. And then suddenly a few months later we have this, which when I saw it, it was totally mind blowing to me.[00:03:59] Isaac Robinson: 1080p, [00:04:00] a whole minute long. We've got light reflecting in puddles. That's reflective. Reminds me of those RTX demonstrations for next generation video games, such as Cyberpunk, but with better graphics. You can see some issues in the background if you look closely, but they're kind of, as with a lot of these models, the issues tend to be things that people aren't going to pay attention to unless they're looking for.[00:04:24] Isaac Robinson: In the same way that like six fingers on a hand. You're not going to notice is a giveaway unless you're looking for it. So yeah, as we said, SORA does not have a paper. So we're going to be filling it in with context from the rest of the computer vision scene attempting to replicate these efforts. So the first step, you have an LLM caption, a huge amount of videos.[00:04:48] Isaac Robinson: This, this is a trick that they introduced in Dolly 3, where they train a image captioning model to just generate very high quality captions for a huge corpus and then train a diffusion model [00:05:00] on that. Their Sora and their application efforts also show a bunch of other steps that are necessary for good video generation.[00:05:09] Isaac Robinson: Including filtering by aesthetic score and filtering by making sure the videos have enough motion. So they're not just like kind of the generators not learning to just generate static frames. So. Then we encode our video into a series of space time latents. Once again, SORA, very sparse in details.[00:05:29] Isaac Robinson: So the replication related works, OpenSORA actually uses a MAG VIT V2 itself to do this, but swapping out the discretization step with a classic VAE autoencoder framework. They show that there's a lot of benefit from getting the temporal compression, which makes a lot of sense as the Each sequential frames and videos have mostly redundant information.[00:05:53] Isaac Robinson: So by compressing against, compressing in the temporal space, you allow the latent to hold [00:06:00] a lot more semantic information while avoiding that duplicate. So, we've got our spacetime latents. Possibly via, there's some 3D VAE, presumably a MAG VATV2 and then you throw it into a diffusion transformer.[00:06:19] Isaac Robinson: So I think it's personally interesting to note that OpenSORA is using a MAG VATV2, which originally used an autoregressive transformer decoder to model the latent space, but is now using a diffusion diffusion transformer. So it's still a transformer happening. Just the question is like, is it?[00:06:37] Isaac Robinson: Parameterizing the stochastic differential equation is, or parameterizing a conditional distribution via autoregression. It's also it's also worth noting that most diffusion models today, the, the very high performance ones are switching away from the classic, like DDPM denoising diffusion probability modeling framework to rectified flows.[00:06:57] Isaac Robinson: Rectified flows have a very interesting property that as [00:07:00] they converge, they actually get closer to being able to be sampled with a single step. Which means that in practice, you can actually generate high quality samples much faster. Major problem of DDPM and related models for the past four years is just that they require many, many steps to generate high quality samples.[00:07:22] Isaac Robinson: So, and naturally, the third step is throwing lots of compute at the problem. So I didn't, I never figured out how to manage to get this video to loop, but we see very little compute, medium compute, lots of compute. This is so interesting because the the original diffusion transformer paper from Facebook actually showed that, in fact, the specific hyperparameters of the transformer didn't really matter that much.[00:07:48] Isaac Robinson: What mattered was that you were just increasing the amount of compute that the model had. So, I love how in the, once again, little blog posts, they don't even talk about [00:08:00] like the specific hyperparameters. They say, we're using a diffusion transformer, and we're just throwing more compute at it, and this is what happens.[00:08:08] Isaac Robinson: OpenSora shows similar results. The primary issue I think here is that no one else has 32x compute budget. So we end up with these we end up in the middle of the domain and most of the related work, which is still super, super cool. It's just a little disappointing considering the context. So I think this is a beautiful extension of the framework that was introduced in 22 and 23 for these very high quality per image generation and then extending that to videos.[00:08:39] Isaac Robinson: It's awesome. And it's GA as of Monday, except no one can seem to get access to it because they keep shutting down the login.[00:08:46] SAM and SAM2[00:08:46] Isaac Robinson: The next, so next paper I wanted to talk about is SAM. So we at Roboflow allow users to label data and train models on that data. Sam, for us, has saved our users 75 years of [00:09:00] labeling time.[00:09:00] Isaac Robinson: We are the, to the best of my knowledge, the largest SAM API that exists. We also, SAM also allows us to have our users train just pure bounding box regression models and use those to generate high quality masks which has the great side effect of requiring less training data to have a meaningful convergence.[00:09:20] Isaac Robinson: So most people are data limited in the real world. So anything that requires less data to get to a useful thing is that super useful. Most of our users actually run their object per frame object detectors on every frame in a video, or maybe not most, but many, many. And so Sam follows into this category of taking, Sam 2 falls into this category of taking something that really really works and applying it to a video which has the wonderful benefit of being plug and play with most of our Many of our users use cases.[00:09:53] Isaac Robinson: We're, we're still building out a sufficiently mature pipeline to take advantage of that, but it's, it's in the works. [00:10:00] So here we've got a great example. We can click on cells and then follow them. You even notice the cell goes away and comes back and we can still keep track of it which is very challenging for existing object trackers.[00:10:14] Isaac Robinson: High level overview of how SAM2 works. We there's a simple pipeline here where we can give, provide some type of prompt and it fills out the rest of the likely masks for that object throughout the rest of the video. So here we're giving a bounding box in the first frame, a set of positive negative points, or even just a simple mask.[00:10:36] Isaac Robinson: I'm going to assume people are somewhat familiar with SAM. So I'm going to just give a high level overview of how SAM works. You have an image encoder that runs on every frame. SAM two can be used on a single image, in which case the only difference between SAM two and SAM is that image encoder, which Sam used a standard VIT [00:11:00] Sam two replaced that with a hara hierarchical encoder, which gets approximately the same results, but leads to a six times faster inference, which is.[00:11:11] Isaac Robinson: Excellent, especially considering how in a trend of 23 was replacing the VAT with more efficient backbones. In the case where you're doing video segmentation, the difference is that you actually create a memory bank and you cross attend the features from the image encoder based on the memory bank.[00:11:31] Isaac Robinson: So the feature set that is created is essentially well, I'll go more into it in a couple of slides, but we take the features from the past couple frames, plus a set of object pointers and the set of prompts and use that to generate our new masks. Then we then fuse the new masks for this frame with the.[00:11:57] Isaac Robinson: Image features and add that to the memory bank. [00:12:00] It's, well, I'll say more in a minute. The just like SAM, the SAM2 actually uses a data engine to create its data set in that people are, they assembled a huge amount of reference data, used people to label some of it and train the model used the model to label more of it and asked people to refine the predictions of the model.[00:12:20] Isaac Robinson: And then ultimately the data set is just created from the engine Final output of the model on the reference data. It's very interesting. This paradigm is so interesting to me because it unifies a model in a dataset in a way that is very unique. It seems unlikely that another model could come in and have such a tight.[00:12:37] Isaac Robinson: So brief overview of how the memory bank works, the paper did not have a great visual, so I'm just, I'm going to fill in a bit more. So we take the last couple of frames from our video. And we take the last couple of frames from our video attend that, along with the set of prompts that we provided, they could come from the future, [00:13:00] they could come from anywhere in the video, as well as reference object pointers, saying, by the way, here's what we've found so far attending to the last few frames has the interesting benefit of allowing it to model complex object motion without actually[00:13:18] Isaac Robinson: By limiting the amount of frames that you attend to, you manage to keep the model running in real time. This is such an interesting topic for me because one would assume that attending to all of the frames is super essential, or having some type of summarization of all the frames is super essential for high performance.[00:13:35] Isaac Robinson: But we see in their later ablation that that actually is not the case. So here, just to make sure that there is some benchmarking happening, we just compared to some of the stuff that's came out prior, and indeed the SAM2 strategy does improve on the state of the art. This ablation deep in their dependencies was super interesting to me.[00:13:59] Isaac Robinson: [00:14:00] We see in section C, the number of memories. One would assume that increasing the count of memories would meaningfully increase performance. And we see that it has some impact, but not the type that you'd expect. And that it meaningfully decreases speed, which justifies, in my mind, just having this FIFO queue of memories.[00:14:20] Isaac Robinson: Although in the future, I'm super interested to see A more dedicated summarization of all of the last video, not just a stacking of the last frames. So that another extension of beautiful per frame work into the video domain.[00:14:42] Realtime detection: DETRs > YOLO[00:14:42] Isaac Robinson: The next trend I'm interested in talking about is this interesting at RoboFlow, we're super interested in training real time object detectors.[00:14:50] Isaac Robinson: Those are bread and butter. And so we're doing a lot to keep track of what is actually happening in that space. We are finally starting to see something change. So, [00:15:00] for years, YOLOs have been the dominant way of doing real time object detection, and we can see here that they've essentially stagnated.[00:15:08] Isaac Robinson: The performance between 10 and 11 is not meaningfully different, at least, you know, in this type of high level chart. And even from the last couple series, there's not. A major change so YOLOs have hit a plateau, debtors have not. So we can look here and see the YOLO series has this plateau. And then these RT debtor, LW debtor, and Define have meaningfully changed that plateau so that in fact, the best Define models are plus 4.[00:15:43] Isaac Robinson: 6 AP on Cocoa at the same latency. So three major steps to accomplish this. The first RT deditor, which is technically a 2023 paper preprint, but published officially in 24, so I'm going to include that. I hope that's okay. [00:16:00] That is showed that RT deditor showed that we could actually match or out speed YOLOs.[00:16:04] Isaac Robinson: And then LWdebtor showed that pre training is hugely effective on debtors and much less so on YOLOs. And then DeFine added the types of bells and whistles that we expect from these types, this, this arena. So the major improvements that RTdebtor shows was Taking the multi scale features that debtors typically pass into their encoder and decoupling them into a much more efficient transformer encoder.[00:16:30] Isaac Robinson: The transformer is of course, quadratic complexity. So decreasing the amount of stuff that you pass in at once is super helpful for increasing your runtime or increasing your throughput. So that change basically brought us up to yellow speed and then they do a hardcore analysis on. Benchmarking YOLOs, including the NMS step.[00:16:54] Isaac Robinson: Once you once you include the NMS in the latency calculation, you see that in fact, these debtors [00:17:00] are outperforming, at least this time, the the, the YOLOs that existed. Then LW debtor goes in and suggests that in fact, the frame, the huge boost here is from pre training. So, this is the define line, and this is the define line without pre training.[00:17:19] Isaac Robinson: It's within range, it's still an improvement over the YOLOs, but Really huge boost comes from the benefit of pre training. When YOLOx came out in 2021, they showed that they got much better results by having a much, much longer training time, but they found that when they did that, they actually did not benefit from pre training.[00:17:40] Isaac Robinson: So, you see in this graph from LWdebtor, in fact, YOLOs do have a real benefit from pre training, but it goes away as we increase the training time. Then, the debtors converge much faster. LWdebtor trains for only 50 epochs, RTdebtor is 60 epochs. So, one could assume that, in fact, [00:18:00] the entire extra gain from pre training is that you're not destroying your original weights.[00:18:06] Isaac Robinson: By relying on this long training cycle. And then LWdebtor also shows superior performance to our favorite data set, Roboflow 100 which means that they do better on the real world, not just on Cocoa. Then Define throws all the bells and whistles at it. Yellow models tend to have a lot of very specific complicated loss functions.[00:18:26] Isaac Robinson: This Define brings that into the debtor world and shows consistent improvement on a variety of debtor based frameworks. So bring these all together and we see that suddenly we have almost 60 AP on Cocoa while running in like 10 milliseconds. Huge, huge stuff. So we're spending a lot of time trying to build models that work better with less data and debtors are clearly becoming a promising step in that direction.[00:18:56] Isaac Robinson: The, what we're interested in seeing [00:19:00] from the debtors in this, this trend to next is. Codetter and the models that are currently sitting on the top of the leaderboard for large scale inference scale really well as you switch out the backbone. We're very interested in seeing and having people publish a paper, potentially us, on what happens if you take these real time ones and then throw a Swingy at it.[00:19:23] Isaac Robinson: Like, do we have a Pareto curve that extends from the real time domain all the way up to the super, super slow but high performance domain? We also want to see people benchmarking in RF100 more, because that type of data is what's relevant for most users. And we want to see more pre training, because pre training works now.[00:19:43] Isaac Robinson: It's super cool.[00:19:48] Peter's Picks[00:19:48] Peter Robicheaux: Alright, so, yeah, so in that theme one of the big things that we're focusing on is how do we get more out of our pre trained models. And one of the lenses to look at this is through sort of [00:20:00] this, this new requirement for like, how Fine grained visual details and your representations that are extracted from your foundation model.[00:20:08] Peter Robicheaux: So it's sort of a hook for this Oh, yeah, this is just a list of all the the papers that I'm going to mention I just want to make sure I set an actual paper so you can find it later[00:20:18] MMVP (Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs)[00:20:18] Peter Robicheaux: Yeah, so sort of the big hook here is that I make the claim that LLMs can't see if you go to if you go to Claude or ChatGPT you ask it to see this Watch and tell me what time it is, it fails, right?[00:20:34] Peter Robicheaux: And so you could say, like, maybe, maybe the Like, this is, like, a very classic test of an LLM, but you could say, Okay, maybe this, this image is, like, too zoomed out, And it just, like, it'll do better if we increase the resolution, And it has easier time finding these fine grained features, Like, where the watch hands are pointing.[00:20:53] Peter Robicheaux: Nodice. And you can say, okay, well, maybe the model just doesn't know how to tell time from knowing the position of the hands. But if you actually prompt [00:21:00] it textually, it's very easy for it to tell the time. So this to me is proof that these LLMs literally cannot see the position of the watch hands and it can't see those details.[00:21:08] Peter Robicheaux: So the question is sort of why? And for you anthropic heads out there, cloud fails too. So the, the, my first pick for best paper of 2024 Envision is this MMVP paper, which tries to investigate the Why do LLMs not have the ability to see fine grained details? And so, for instance, it comes up with a lot of images like this, where you ask it a question that seems very visually apparent to us, like, which way is the school bus facing?[00:21:32] Peter Robicheaux: And it gets it wrong, and then, of course, it makes up details to support its wrong claim. And so, the process by which it finds these images is sort of contained in its hypothesis for why it can't. See these details. So it hypothesizes that models that have been initialized with, with Clip as their vision encoder, they don't have fine grained details and the, the features extracted using Clip because Clip sort of doesn't need to find these fine grained [00:22:00] details to do its job correctly, which is just to match captions and images, right?[00:22:04] Peter Robicheaux: And sort of at a high level, even if ChatGPT wasn't initialized with Clip and wasn't trained contrastively at all. The vision encoder wasn't trained contrastively at all. Still, in order to do its job of capturing the image it could do a pretty good job without actually finding the exact position of all the objects and visual features in the image, right?[00:22:21] Peter Robicheaux: So This paper finds a set of difficult images for these types of models. And the way it does it is it looks for embeddings that are similar in clip space, but far in DynaV2 space. So DynaV2 is a foundation model that was trained self supervised purely on image data. And it kind of uses like some complex student teacher framework, but essentially, and like, it patches out like certain areas of the image or like crops with certain areas of the image and tries to make sure that those have consistent representations, which is a way for it to learn very fine grained visual features.[00:22:54] Peter Robicheaux: And so if you take things that are very close in clip space and very far in DynaV2 space, you get a set of images [00:23:00] that Basically, pairs of images that are hard for a chat GPT and other big language models to distinguish. So, if you then ask it questions about this image, well, as you can see from this chart, it's going to answer the same way for both images, right?[00:23:14] Peter Robicheaux: Because to, to, from the perspective of the vision encoder, they're the same image. And so if you ask a question like, how many eyes does this animal have? It answers the same for both. And like all these other models, including Lava do the same thing, right? And so this is the benchmark that they create, which is like finding clip, like clip line pairs, which is pairs of images that are similar in clip space and creating a data set of multiple choice questions based off of those.[00:23:39] Peter Robicheaux: And so how do these models do? Well, really bad. Lava, I think, So, so, chat2BT and Jim and I do a little bit better than random guessing, but, like, half of the performance of humans who find these problems to be very easy. Lava is, interestingly, extremely negatively correlated with this dataset. It does much, much, much, much worse [00:24:00] than random guessing, which means that this process has done a very good job of identifying hard images for, for Lava, specifically.[00:24:07] Peter Robicheaux: And that's because Lava is basically not trained for very long and is initialized from Clip, and so You would expect it to do poorly on this dataset. So, one of the proposed solutions that this paper attempts is by basically saying, Okay, well if clip features aren't enough, What if we train the visual encoder of the language model also on dyno features?[00:24:27] Peter Robicheaux: And so it, it proposes two different ways of doing this. One, additively which is basically interpolating between the two features, and then one is interleaving, which is just kind of like training one on the combination of both features. So there's this really interesting trend when you do the additive mixture of features.[00:24:45] Peter Robicheaux: So zero is all clip features and one is all DynaV2 features. So. It, as you, so I think it's helpful to look at the right most chart first, which is as you increase the number of DynaV2 features, your model does worse and worse and [00:25:00] worse on the actual language modeling task. And that's because DynaV2 features were trained completely from a self supervised manner and completely in image space.[00:25:08] Peter Robicheaux: It knows nothing about text. These features aren't really compatible with these text models. And so you can train an adapter all you want, but it seems that it's in such an alien language that it's like a very hard optimization for this. These models to solve. And so that kind of supports what's happening on the left, which is that, yeah, it gets better at answering these questions if as you include more dyna V two features up to a point, but then you, when you oversaturate, it completely loses its ability to like.[00:25:36] Peter Robicheaux: Answer language and do language tasks. So you can also see with the interleaving, like they essentially double the number of tokens that are going into these models and just train on both, and it still doesn't really solve the MMVP task. It gets Lava 1. 5 above random guessing by a little bit, but it's still not close to ChachiPT or, you know, Any like human performance, obviously.[00:25:59] Peter Robicheaux: [00:26:00] So clearly this proposed solution of just using DynaV2 features directly, isn't going to work. And basically what that means is that as a as a vision foundation model, DynaV2 is going to be insufficient for language tasks, right?[00:26:14] Florence 2 (Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks)[00:26:14] Peter Robicheaux: So my next pick for best paper of 2024 would be Florence 2, which tries to solve this problem by incorporating not only This dimension of spatial hierarchy, which is to say pixel level understanding, but also in making sure to include what they call semantic granularity, which ends up, the goal is basically to have features that are sufficient for finding objects in the image, so they're, they're, they have enough pixel information, but also can be talked about and can be reasoned about.[00:26:44] Peter Robicheaux: And that's on the semantic granularity axis. So here's an example of basically three different paradigms of labeling that they do. So they, they create a big dataset. One is text, which is just captioning. And you would expect a model that's trained [00:27:00] only on captioning to have similar performance like chat2BT and like not have spatial hierarchy, not have features that are meaningful at the pixel level.[00:27:08] Peter Robicheaux: And so they add another type, which is region text pairs, which is essentially either classifying a region or You're doing object detection or doing instance segmentation on that region or captioning that region. And then they have text phrased region annotations, which is essentially a triple. And basically, not only do you have a region that you've described, you also find it's like, It's placed in a descriptive paragraph about the image, which is basically trying to introduce even more like semantic understanding of these regions.[00:27:39] Peter Robicheaux: And so like, for instance, if you're saying a woman riding on the road, right, you have to know what a woman is and what the road is and that she's on top of it. And that's, that's basically composing a bunch of objects in this visual space, but also thinking about it semantically, right? And so the way that they do this is they take basically they just dump Features from a vision encoder [00:28:00] straight into a encoder decoder transformer.[00:28:03] Peter Robicheaux: And then they train a bunch of different tasks like object detection and so on as a language task. And I think that's one of the big things that we saw in 2024 is these, these vision language models operating in, on pixel space linguistically. So they introduced a bunch of new tokens to point to locations and[00:28:22] Peter Robicheaux: So how does it work? How does it actually do? We can see if you look at the graph on the right, which is using the, the Dino, the the Dino framework your, your pre trained Florence 2 models transfer very, very well. They get 60%, 60 percent map on Cocoa, which is like approaching state of the art and they train[00:28:42] Vik Korrapati: with, and they[00:28:43] Peter Robicheaux: train with a much more more efficiently.[00:28:47] Peter Robicheaux: So they, they converge a lot faster, which both of these things are pointing to the fact that they're actually leveraging their pre trained weights effectively. So where is it falling short? So these models, I forgot to mention, Florence is a 0. 2 [00:29:00] billion and a 0. 7 billion parameter count. So they're very, very small in terms of being a language model.[00:29:05] Peter Robicheaux: And I think that. This framework, you can see saturation. So, what this graph is showing is that if you train a Florence 2 model purely on the image level and region level annotations and not including the pixel level annotations, like this, segmentation, it actually performs better as an object detector.[00:29:25] Peter Robicheaux: And what that means is that it's not able to actually learn all the visual tasks that it's trying to learn because it doesn't have enough capacity.[00:29:32] PalíGemma / PaliGemma 2[00:29:32] Peter Robicheaux: So I'd like to see this paper explore larger model sizes, which brings us to our next big paper of 2024 or two papers. So PolyGemma came out earlier this year.[00:29:42] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma 2 was released, I think like a week or two ago. Oh, I forgot to mention, you can actually train You can, like, label text datasets on RoboFlow and you can train a Florence 2 model and you can actually train a PolyGemma 2 model on RoboFlow, which we got into the platform within, like, 14 hours of release, which I was really excited about.[00:29:59] Peter Robicheaux: So, anyway, so [00:30:00] PolyGemma 2, so PolyGemma is essentially doing the same thing, but instead of doing an encoder decoder, it just dumps everything into a decoder only transformer model. But it also introduced the concept of location tokens to point to objects in pixel space. PolyGemma 2, so PolyGemma uses Gemma as the language encoder, and it uses Gemma2B.[00:30:17] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma 2 introduces using multiple different sizes of language encoders. So, the way that they sort of get around having to do encoder decoder is they use the concept of prefix loss. Which basically means that when it's generating, tokens autoregressively, it's all those tokens in the prefix, which is like the image that it's looking at and like a description of the task that it's trying to do.[00:30:41] Peter Robicheaux: They're attending to each other fully, full attention. Which means that, you know, it can sort of. Find high level it's easier for the, the prefix to color, to color the output of the suffix and also to just find like features easily. So this is sort of [00:31:00] an example of like one of the tasks that was trained on, which is like, you describe the task in English and then you give it all these, like, You're asking for it to segment these two classes of objects, and then it finds, like, their locations using these tokens, and it finds their masks using some encoding of the masks into tokens.[00:31:24] Peter Robicheaux: And, yeah, so, one of my critiques, I guess, of PolyGemma 1, at least, is that You find that performance saturates as a pre trained model after only 300 million examples seen. So, what this graph is representing is each blue dot is a performance on some downstream task. And you can see that after seeing 300 million examples, It sort of does equally well on all of the downtrend tasks that they tried it on, which was a lot as 1 billion examples, which to me also kind of suggests a lack of capacity for this model.[00:31:58] Peter Robicheaux: PolyGemma2, [00:32:00] you can see the results on object detection. So these were transferred to to Coco. And you can see that this sort of also points to an increase in capacity being helpful to the model. You can see as. Both the resolution increases, and the parameter count of the language model increases, performance increases.[00:32:16] Peter Robicheaux: So resolution makes sense, obviously, it helps to find small images, or small objects in the image. But it also makes sense for another reason, which is that it kind of gives the model a thinking register, and it gives it more tokens to, like, process when making its predictions. But yeah, you could, you could say, oh, 43.[00:32:30] Peter Robicheaux: 6, that's not that great, like Florence 2 got 60. But this is not Training a dino or a debtor on top of this language or this image encoder. It's doing the raw language modeling task on Cocoa. So it doesn't have any of the bells and whistles. It doesn't have any of the fancy losses. It doesn't even have bipartite graph matching or anything like that.[00:32:52] Peter Robicheaux: Okay, the big result and one of the reasons that I was really excited about this paper is that they blow everything else away [00:33:00] on MMVP. I mean, 47. 3, sure, that's nowhere near human accuracy, which, again, is 94%, but for a, you know, a 2 billion language, 2 billion parameter language model to be chat2BT, that's quite the achievement.[00:33:12] Peter Robicheaux: And that sort of brings us to our final pick for paper of the year, which is AIMV2. So, AIMV2 sort of says, okay, Maybe this language model, like, maybe coming up with all these specific annotations to find features and with high fidelity and pixel space isn't actually necessary. And we can come up with an even simpler, more beautiful idea for combining you know, image tokens and pixel tokens in a way that's interfaceable for language tasks.[00:33:44] Peter Robicheaux: And this is nice because it can scale, you can come up with lots more data if you don't have to come up with all these annotations, right? So the way that it works. is it does something very, very similar to PolyGemo, where you have a vision encoder that dumps image tokens into a decoder only transformer.[00:33:59] Peter Robicheaux: But [00:34:00] the interesting thing is that it also autoregressively tries to learn the mean squared error of the image tokens. So instead of having to come up with fancy object detection or semantic, or segment, or segmentation labels, you can just try to reconstruct the image and have it learn fine grained features that way.[00:34:16] Peter Robicheaux: And it does this in kind of, I think, a beautiful way that's kind of compatible with the PolyGemma line of thinking, which is randomly sampling a prefix line of thinking Prefix length and using only this number of image tokens as the prefix. And so doing a similar thing with the causal. So the causal with prefix is the, the attention mask on the right.[00:34:35] Peter Robicheaux: So it's doing full block attention with some randomly sampled number of image tokens to then reconstruct the rest of the image and the downstream caption for that image. And so, This is the dataset that they train on. It's image or internet scale data, very high quality data created by the data filtering networks paper, essentially which is maybe The best clip data that exists.[00:34:59] Peter Robicheaux: [00:35:00] And we can see that this is finally a model that doesn't saturate. It's even at the highest parameter count, it's, it appears to be, oh, at the highest parameter account, it appears to be improving in performance with more and more samples seen. And so you can sort of think that. You know, if we just keep bumping the parameter count and increasing the example scene, which is the, the, the line of thinking for language models, then it'll keep getting better.[00:35:27] Peter Robicheaux: So how does it actually do at finding, oh, it also improves with resolution, which you would expect for a model that This is the ImageNet classification accuracy, but yeah, it does better if you increase the resolution, which means that it's actually leveraging and finding fine grained visual features.[00:35:44] Peter Robicheaux: And so how does that actually do compared to CLIP on Cocoa? Well, you can see that if you slap a transformer detection head on it, Entry now in Cocoa, it's just 60. 2, which is also within spitting distance of Soda, which means that it does a very good job of [00:36:00] finding visual features, but you could say, okay, well, wait a second.[00:36:03] Peter Robicheaux: Clip got to 59. 1, so. Like, how does this prove your claim at all? Because doesn't that mean like clip, which is known to be clip blind and do badly on MMVP, it's able to achieve a very high performance on fine, on this fine grained visual features task of object detection, well, they train on like, Tons of data.[00:36:24] Peter Robicheaux: They train on like objects, 365, Cocoa, Flickr and everything else. And so I think that this benchmark doesn't do a great job of selling how good of a pre trained model MV2 is. And we would like to see the performance on fewer data as examples and not trained to convergence on object detection. So seeing it in the real world on like a dataset, like RoboFlow 100, I think would be quite interesting.[00:36:48] Peter Robicheaux: And our, our, I guess our final, final pick for paper of 2024 would be Moondream. So introducing Vic to talk about that.[00:36:54] swyx: But overall, that was exactly what I was looking for. Like best of 2024, an amazing job. Yeah, you can, [00:37:00] if there's any other questions while Vic gets set up, like vision stuff,[00:37:07] swyx: yeah,[00:37:11] swyx: Vic, go ahead. Hi,[00:37:13] Vik Korrapati / Moondream[00:37:13] question: well, while we're getting set up, hi, over here, thanks for the really awesome talk. One of the things that's been weird and surprising is that the foundation model companies Even these MLMs, they're just like worse than RT Tether at detection still. Like, if you wanted to pay a bunch of money to auto label your detection dataset, If you gave it to OpenAI or Cloud, that would be like a big waste.[00:37:37] question: So I'm curious, just like, even Pali Gemma 2, like is worse. So, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like, how come, Nobody's cracked the code on like a generalist that really you know, beats a specialist model in computer vision like they have in in LLM land.[00:38:00][00:38:01] Isaac Robinson: Okay. It's a very, very interesting question. I think it depends on the specific domain. For image classification, it's basically there. In the, in AIMv2 showed, a simple attentional probe on the pre trained features gets like 90%, which is as well as anyone does. The, the, the, the bigger question, like, why isn't it transferring to object detection, especially like real time object detection.[00:38:25] Isaac Robinson: I think, in my mind, there are two answers. One is, object detection is really, really, really the architectures are super domain specific. You know, we see these, all these super, super complicated things, and it's not super easy to, to, to build something that just transfers naturally like that, whereas image classification, you know, clip pre training transfers super, super quickly.[00:38:48] Isaac Robinson: And the other thing is, until recently, the real time object detectors didn't even really benefit from pre training. Like, you see the YOLOs that are like, essentially saturated, showing very little [00:39:00] difference with pre training improvements, with using pre trained model at all. It's not surprising, necessarily, that People aren't looking at the effects of better and better pre training on real time detection.[00:39:12] Isaac Robinson: Maybe that'll change in the next year. Does that answer your question?[00:39:17] Peter Robicheaux: Can you guys hear me? Yeah, one thing I want to add is just like, or just to summarize, basically, is that like, Until 2024, you know, we haven't really seen a combination of transformer based object detectors and fancy losses, and PolyGemma suffers from the same problem, which is basically to say that these ResNet, or like the convolutional models, they have all these, like, extreme optimizations for doing object detection, but essentially, I think it's kind of been shown now that convolution models like just don't benefit from pre training and just don't like have the level of intelligence of transformer models.[00:39:56] swyx: Awesome. Hi,[00:39:59] Vik Korrapati: can [00:40:00] you hear me?[00:40:01] swyx: Cool. I hear you. See you. Are you sharing your screen?[00:40:04] Vik Korrapati: Hi. Might have forgotten to do that. Let me do[00:40:07] swyx: that. Sorry, should have done[00:40:08] Vik Korrapati: that.[00:40:17] swyx: Here's your screen. Oh, classic. You might have to quit zoom and restart. What? It's fine. We have a capture of your screen.[00:40:34] swyx: So let's get to it.[00:40:35] Vik Korrapati: Okay, easy enough.[00:40:49] Vik Korrapati: All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Vic. I've been working on Moondream for almost a year now. Like Shawn mentioned, I just went and looked and it turns out the first version I released December [00:41:00] 29, 2023. It's been a fascinating journey. So Moonbeam started off as a tiny vision language model. Since then, we've expanded scope a little bit to also try and build some tooling, client libraries, et cetera, to help people really deploy it.[00:41:13] Vik Korrapati: Unlike traditional large models that are focused at assistant type use cases, we're laser focused on building capabilities that developers can, sorry, it's yeah, we're basically focused on building capabilities that developers can use to build vision applications that can run anywhere. So, in a lot of cases for vision more so than for text, you really care about being able to run on the edge, run in real time, etc.[00:41:40] Vik Korrapati: So That's really important. We have we have different output modalities that we support. There's query where you can ask general English questions about an image and get back human like answers. There's captioning, which a lot of our users use for generating synthetic datasets to then train diffusion models and whatnot.[00:41:57] Vik Korrapati: We've done a lot of work to minimize those sessions there. [00:42:00] So that's. Use lot. We have open vocabulary object detection built in similar to a couple of more recent models like Palagem, et cetera, where rather than having to train a dedicated model, you can just say show me soccer balls in this image or show me if there are any deer in this image, it'll detect it.[00:42:14] Vik Korrapati: More recently, earlier this month, we released pointing capability where if all you're interested in is the center of an object you can just ask it to point out where that is. This is very useful when you're doing, you know, I automation type stuff. Let's see, LA we, we have two models out right now.[00:42:33] Vik Korrapati: There's a general purpose to be para model, which runs fair. Like it's, it's it's fine if you're running on server. It's good for our local Amma desktop friends and it can run on flagship, flagship mobile phones, but it never. so much for joining us today, and we'll see you in the [00:43:00] next one. Less memory even with our not yet fully optimized inference client.[00:43:06] Vik Korrapati: So the way we built our 0. 5b model was to start with the 2 billion parameter model and prune it while doing continual training to retain performance. We, our objective during the pruning was to preserve accuracy across a broad set of benchmarks. So the way we went about it was to estimate the importance of different components of the model, like attention heads, channels MLP rows and whatnot using basically a technique based on the gradient.[00:43:37] Vik Korrapati: I'm not sure how much people want to know details. We'll be writing a paper about this, but feel free to grab me if you have more questions. Then we iteratively prune a small chunk that will minimize loss and performance retrain the model to recover performance and bring it back. The 0. 5b we released is more of a proof of concept that this is possible.[00:43:54] Vik Korrapati: I think the thing that's really exciting about this is it makes it possible for for developers to build using the 2B param [00:44:00] model and just explore, build their application, and then once they're ready to deploy figure out what exactly they need out of the model and prune those capabilities into a smaller form factor that makes sense for their deployment target.[00:44:12] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, very excited about that. Let me talk to you folks a little bit about another problem I've been working on recently, which is similar to the clocks example we've been talking about. We had a customer reach out who was talking about, like, who had a bunch of gauges out in the field. This is very common in manufacturing and oil and gas, where you have a bunch of analog devices that you need to monitor.[00:44:34] Vik Korrapati: It's expensive to. And I was like, okay, let's have humans look at that and monitor stuff and make sure that the system gets shut down when the temperature goes over 80 or something. So I was like, yeah, this seems easy enough. Happy to, happy to help you distill that. Let's, let's get it going. Turns out our model couldn't do it at all.[00:44:51] Vik Korrapati: I went and looked at other open source models to see if I could just generate a bunch of data and learn from that. Did not work either. So I was like, let's look at what the folks with [00:45:00] hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap have to offer. And yeah, that doesn't work either. My hypothesis is that like the, the way these models are trained are using a large amount of image text data scraped from the internet.[00:45:15] Vik Korrapati: And that can be biased. In the case of gauges, most gauge images aren't gauges in the wild, they're product images. Detail images like these, where it's always set to zero. It's paired with an alt text that says something like GIVTO, pressure sensor, PSI, zero to 30 or something. And so the models are fairly good at picking up those details.[00:45:35] Vik Korrapati: It'll tell you that it's a pressure gauge. It'll tell you what the brand is, but it doesn't really learn to pay attention to the needle over there. And so, yeah, that's a gap we need to address. So naturally my mind goes to like, let's use synthetic data to, Solve this problem. That works, but it's problematic because it turned out we needed millions of synthetic gauge images to get to reasonable performance.[00:45:57] Vik Korrapati: And thinking about it, reading a gauge is like [00:46:00] not a one, like it's not a zero short process in our minds, right? Like if you had to tell me the reading in Celsius for this, Real world gauge. There's two dials on there. So first you have to figure out which one you have to be paying attention to, like the inner one or the outer one.[00:46:14] Vik Korrapati: You look at the tip of the needle, you look at what labels it's between, and you count how many and do some math to figure out what that probably is. So what happens if we just add that as a Chain of thought to give the model better understanding of the different sub, to allow the model to better learn the subtasks it needs to perform to accomplish this goal.[00:46:37] Vik Korrapati: So you can see in this example, this was actually generated by the latest version of our model. It's like, okay, Celsius is the inner scale. It's between 50 and 60. There's 10 ticks. So the second tick, it's a little debatable here, like there's a weird shadow situation going on, the dial is off, so I don't know what the ground truth is, but it works okay.[00:46:57] Vik Korrapati: There's points on there that are, the points [00:47:00] over there are actually grounded. I don't know if this is easy to see, but when I click on those, there's a little red dot that moves around on the image. The model actually has to predict where this points are, I was already trying to do this with bounding boxes, but then Malmo came out with pointing capabilities.[00:47:15] Vik Korrapati: And it's like pointing is a much better paradigm to to represent this. We see pretty good results. This one's actually for clock reading. I couldn't find our chart for gauge reading at the last minute. So the light. Blue chart is with our rounded chain of thought. This measures, we have, we built a clock reading benchmark about 500 images.[00:47:37] Vik Korrapati: This measures accuracy on that. You can see it's a lot more sample efficient when you're using the chain of thought to model. Another big benefit from this approach is like, you can kind of understand how the model is. it and how it's failing. So in this example, the actual correct reading is 54 Celsius, the model output [00:48:00] 56, not too bad but you can actually go and see where it messed up. Like it got a lot of these right, except instead of saying it was on the 7th tick, it actually predicted that it was the 8th tick and that's why it went with 56.[00:48:14] Vik Korrapati: So now that you know that this. Failing in this way, you can adjust how you're doing the chain of thought to maybe say like, actually count out each tick from 40, instead of just trying to say it's the eighth tick. Or you might say like, okay, I see that there's that middle thing, I'll count from there instead of all the way from 40.[00:48:31] Vik Korrapati: So helps a ton. The other thing I'm excited about is a few short prompting or test time training with this. Like if a customer has a specific gauge that like we're seeing minor errors on, they can give us a couple of examples where like, if it's miss detecting the. Needle, they can go in and correct that in the chain of thought.[00:48:49] Vik Korrapati: And hopefully that works the next time. Now, exciting approach, we only apply it to clocks and gauges. The real question is, is it going to generalize? Probably, like, there's some science [00:49:00] from text models that when you train on a broad number of tasks, it does generalize. And I'm seeing some science with our model as well.[00:49:05] Vik Korrapati: So, in addition to the image based chain of thought stuff, I also added some spelling based chain of thought to help it understand better understand OCR, I guess. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this, by the way. Like, it's trivial benchmark question. It's Very, very easy to nail. But I also wanted to support it for stuff like license plate, partial matching, like, hey, does any license plate in this image start with WHA or whatever?[00:49:29] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, that sort of worked. All right, that, that ends my story about the gauges. If you think about what's going on over here it's interesting that like LLMs are showing enormous. Progress in reasoning, especially with the latest set of models that we've seen, but we're not really seeing, I have a feeling that VLMs are lagging behind, as we can see with these tasks that should be very simple for a human to do [00:50:00] that are very easy to find VLMs failing at.[00:50:04] Vik Korrapati: My hypothesis on why this is the case is because On the internet, there's a ton of data that talks about how to reason. There's books about how to solve problems. There's books critiquing the books about how to solve problems. But humans are just so good at perception that we never really talk about it.[00:50:20] Vik Korrapati: Like, maybe in art books where it's like, hey, to show that that mountain is further away, you need to desaturate it a bit or whatever. But the actual data on how to, like, look at images is, isn't really present. Also, the Data we have is kind of sketched. The best source of data we have is like image all text pairs on the internet and that's pretty low quality.[00:50:40] Vik Korrapati: So yeah, I, I think our solution here is really just we need to teach them how to operate on individual tasks and figure out how to scale that out. All right. Yep. So conclusion. At Moondream we're trying to build amazing PLMs that run everywhere. Very hard problem. Much work ahead, but we're making a ton of progress and I'm really excited [00:51:00] about If anyone wants to chat about more technical details about how we're doing this or interest in collaborating, please, please hit me up.[00:51:08] Isaac Robinson: Yeah,[00:51:09] swyx: like, I always, when people say, when people say multi modality, like, you know, I always think about vision as the first among equals in all the modalities. So, I really appreciate having the experts in the room. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Happy holidays! We'll be sharing snippets from Latent Space LIVE! through the break bringing you the best of 2024 from friends of the pod!For NeurIPS last year we did our standard conference podcast coverage interviewing selected papers (that we have now also done for ICLR and ICML), however we felt that we could be doing more to help AI Engineers 1) get more industry-relevant content, and 2) recap 2024 year in review from experts. As a result, we organized the first Latent Space LIVE!, our first in person miniconference, at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver. For our opening keynote, we could think of no one better to cover 'The State of AI Startups' than our friend Sarah Guo (AI superinvestor, founder of Conviction, host of No Priors!) and Pranav Reddy (Conviction partner) to share their takes on how the AI landscape evolved in 2024 examine the evolving AI landscape and what it means for startups, enterprises, and the industry as a whole! They completely understood the assignment.Recorded live with 200+ in-person and 2200+ online attendees at NeurIPS 2024, this keynote kicks off our mini-conference series exploring different domains of AI development in 2024. Enjoy!LinksSlides: https://x.com/saranormous/status/1866933642401886707Sarh Guo: https://x.com/saranormousPranav Reddy: https://x.com/prnvrdyFull Video on YouTubeWant more content like this? Like and subscribe to stay updated on our latest talks, interviews, and podcasts. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Regular tickets are now sold out for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS! We have just announced our last speaker and newest track, friend of the pod Nathan Lambert who will be recapping 2024 in Reasoning Models like o1! We opened up a handful of late bird tickets for those who are deciding now — use code DISCORDGANG if you need it. See you in Vancouver!We've been sitting on our ICML recordings for a while (from today's first-ever SOLO guest cohost, Brittany Walker), and in light of Sora Turbo's launch (blogpost, tutorials) today, we figured it would be a good time to drop part one which had been gearing up to be a deep dive into the state of generative video worldsim, with a seamless transition to vision (the opposite modality), and finally robots (their ultimate application).Sora, Genie, and the field of Generative Video World SimulatorsBill Peebles, author of Diffusion Transformers, gave his most recent Sora talk at ICML, which begins our episode:* William (Bill) Peebles - SORA (slides)Something that is often asked about Sora is how much inductive biases were introduced to achieve these results. Bill references the same principles brought by Hyung Won Chung from the o1 team - “sooner or later those biases come back to bite you”.We also recommend these reads from throughout 2024 on Sora.* Lilian Weng's literature review of Video Diffusion Models* Sora API leak* Estimates of 100k-700k H100s needed to serve Sora (not Turbo)* Artist guides on using Sora for professional storytellingGoogle DeepMind had a remarkably strong presence at ICML on Video Generation Models, winning TWO Best Paper awards for:* Genie: Generative Interactive Environments (covered in oral, poster, and workshop)* VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation (see website)We end this part by taking in Tali Dekel's talk on The Future of Video Generation: Beyond Data and Scale.Part 2: Generative Modeling and DiffusionSince 2023, Sander Dieleman's perspectives (blogpost, tweet) on diffusion as “spectral autoregression in the frequency domain” while working on Imagen and Veo have caught the public imagination, so we highlight his talk:* Wading through the noise: an intuitive look at diffusion modelsThen we go to Ben Poole for his talk on Inferring 3D Structure with 2D Priors, including his work on NeRFs and DreamFusion:Then we investigate two flow matching papers - one from the Flow Matching co-authors - Ricky T. Q. Chen (FAIR, Meta)And how it is implemented in Stable Diffusion 3 with Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis Our last hit on Diffusion is a couple of oral presentations on speech, which we leave you to explore via our audio podcast* NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models* Speech Self-Supervised Learning Using Diffusion Model Synthetic DataPart 3: VisionThe ICML Test of Time winner was DeCAF, which Trevor Darrell notably called “the OG vision foundation model”.Lucas Beyer's talk on “Vision in the age of LLMs — a data-centric perspective” was also well received online, and he talked about his journey from Vision Transformers to PaliGemma.We give special honorable mention to MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark.Part 4: Reinforcement Learning and RoboticsWe segue vision into robotics with the help of Ashley Edwards, whose work on both the Gato and the Genie teams at Deepmind is summarized in Learning actions, policies, rewards, and environments from videos alone.Brittany highlighted two poster session papers:* Behavior Generation with Latent Actions* We also recommend Lerrel Pinto's On Building General-Purpose Robots* PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMsHowever we must give the lion's share of space to Chelsea Finn, now founder of Physical Intelligence, who gave FOUR talks on* "What robots have taught me about machine learning"* developing robot generalists* robots that adapt autonomously* how to give feedback to your language model* special mention to PI colleague Sergey Levine on Robotic Foundation ModelsWe end the podcast with a position paper that links generative environments and RL/robotics: Automatic Environment Shaping is the Next Frontier in RL.Timestamps* [00:00:00] Intros* [00:02:43] Sora - Bill Peebles* [00:44:52] Genie: Generative Interactive Environments* [01:00:17] Genie interview* [01:12:33] VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation* [01:30:51] VideoPoet interview - Dan Kondratyuk* [01:42:00] Tali Dekel - The Future of Video Generation: Beyond Data and Scale.* [02:27:07] Sander Dieleman - Wading through the noise: an intuitive look at diffusion models* [03:06:20] Ben Poole - Inferring 3D Structure with 2D Priors* [03:30:30] Ricky Chen - Flow Matching* [04:00:03] Patrick Esser - Stable Diffusion 3* [04:14:30] NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models* [04:27:00] Speech Self-Supervised Learning Using Diffusion Model Synthetic Data* [04:39:00] ICML Test of Time winner: DeCAF* [05:03:40] Lucas Beyer: “Vision in the age of LLMs — a data-centric perspective”* [05:42:00] Ashley Edwards: Learning actions, policies, rewards, and environments from videos alone.* [06:03:30] Behavior Generation with Latent Actions interview* [06:09:52] Chelsea Finn: "What robots have taught me about machine learning"* [06:56:00] Position: Automatic Environment Shaping is the Next Frontier in RL Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

On this episode of Gear Talk, Wes Cash sits down with special guest Mina Soliman, CEO of Prime Gear and Noria Regional Technical Consultant, to talk about the state of reliability in the Middle East and the crucial role failure analysis is playing in creating world-class facilities.  Mina has decades of experience and multiple significant contributions to lubrication standards, such as ICML 55. In this podcast, Mina explains how reliability is becoming engrained in Middle Eastern manufacturing culture, especially as different industries and reliability standards are introduced. From Oil & Gas to Food & Beverage and Cement & Steel, join us as we dive into the unique nature of these industries in the Middle East. Learn about new strategies they are using to overcome challenging asset failures and establish a new status quo: using expert analysis to discover root causes.

Professor Swarat Chaudhuri from the University of Texas at Austin and visiting researcher at Google DeepMind discusses breakthroughs in AI reasoning, theorem proving, and mathematical discovery. Chaudhuri explains his groundbreaking work on COPRA (a GPT-based prover agent), shares insights on neurosymbolic approaches to AI. Professor Swarat Chaudhuri: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~swarat/ SPONSOR MESSAGES: CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale deployments. https://centml.ai/pricing/ Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on ARC and AGI, they just acquired MindsAI - the current winners of the ARC challenge. Are you interested in working on ARC, or getting involved in their events? Goto https://tufalabs.ai/ TOC: [00:00:00] 0. Introduction / CentML ad, Tufa ad 1. AI Reasoning: From Language Models to Neurosymbolic Approaches [00:02:27] 1.1 Defining Reasoning in AI [00:09:51] 1.2 Limitations of Current Language Models [00:17:22] 1.3 Neuro-symbolic Approaches and Program Synthesis [00:24:59] 1.4 COPRA and In-Context Learning for Theorem Proving [00:34:39] 1.5 Symbolic Regression and LLM-Guided Abstraction 2. AI in Mathematics: Theorem Proving and Concept Discovery [00:43:37] 2.1 AI-Assisted Theorem Proving and Proof Verification [01:01:37] 2.2 Symbolic Regression and Concept Discovery in Mathematics [01:11:57] 2.3 Scaling and Modularizing Mathematical Proofs [01:21:53] 2.4 COPRA: In-Context Learning for Formal Theorem-Proving [01:28:22] 2.5 AI-driven theorem proving and mathematical discovery 3. Formal Methods and Challenges in AI Mathematics [01:30:42] 3.1 Formal proofs, empirical predicates, and uncertainty in AI mathematics [01:34:01] 3.2 Characteristics of good theoretical computer science research [01:39:16] 3.3 LLMs in theorem generation and proving [01:42:21] 3.4 Addressing contamination and concept learning in AI systems REFS: 00:04:58 The Chinese Room Argument, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ 00:11:42 Software 2.0, https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 00:11:57 Solving Olympiad Geometry Without Human Demonstrations, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06747-5 00:13:26 Lean, https://lean-lang.org/ 00:15:43 A General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm That Masters Chess, Shogi, and Go Through Self-Play, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar6404 00:19:24 DreamCoder (Ellis et al., PLDI 2021), https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381 00:24:37 The Lambda Calculus, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lambda-calculus/ 00:26:43 Neural Sketch Learning for Conditional Program Generation, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05698 00:28:08 Learning Differentiable Programs With Admissible Neural Heuristics, https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.12101 00:31:03 Symbolic Regression With a Learned Concept Library (Grayeli et al., NeurIPS 2024), https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09359 00:41:30 Formal Verification of Parallel Programs, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360251 01:00:37 Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556 01:18:19 Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 01:18:42 Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers With Informal Proofs, https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12283 01:19:49 Learning Formal Mathematics From Intrinsic Motivation, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 01:20:19 An In-Context Learning Agent for Formal Theorem-Proving (Thakur et al., CoLM 2024), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04353 01:23:58 Learning to Prove Theorems via Interacting With Proof Assistants, https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09381 01:39:58 An In-Context Learning Agent for Formal Theorem-Proving (Thakur et al., CoLM 2024), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04353 01:42:24 Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning (Verma et al., ICML 2018), https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02477

Episode 140I spoke with Professor Jacob Andreas about:* Language and the world* World models* How he's developed as a scientistEnjoy!Jacob is an associate professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to build intelligent systems that can learn from human guidance. Jacob earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, his M.Phil. from Cambridge (where he studied as a Churchill scholar) and his B.S. from Columbia. He has received a Sloan fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, MIT's Junior Bose and Kolokotrones teaching awards, and paper awards at ACL, ICML and NAACL.Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (00:40) Jacob's relationship with grounding fundamentalism* (05:21) Jacob's reaction to LLMs* (11:24) Grounding language — is there a philosophical problem?* (15:54) Grounding and language modeling* (24:00) Analogies between humans and LMs* (30:46) Grounding language with points and paths in continuous spaces* (32:00) Neo-Davidsonian formal semantics* (36:27) Evolving assumptions about structure prediction* (40:14) Segmentation and event structure* (42:33) How much do word embeddings encode about syntax?* (43:10) Jacob's process for studying scientific questions* (45:38) Experiments and hypotheses* (53:01) Calibrating assumptions as a researcher* (54:08) Flexibility in research* (56:09) Measuring Compositionality in Representation Learning* (56:50) Developing an independent research agenda and developing a lab culture* (1:03:25) Language Models as Agent Models* (1:04:30) Background* (1:08:33) Toy experiments and interpretability research* (1:13:30) Developing effective toy experiments* (1:15:25) Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building* (1:15:56) OthelloGPT's bag of heuristics and multiple “world models”* (1:21:32) What is a world model?* (1:23:45) The Big Question — from meaning to world models* (1:28:21) From “meaning” to precise questions about LMs* (1:32:01) Mechanistic interpretability and reading tea leaves* (1:35:38) Language and the world* (1:38:07) Towards better language models* (1:43:45) Model editing* (1:45:50) On academia's role in NLP research* (1:49:13) On good science* (1:52:36) OutroLinks:* Jacob's homepage and Twitter* Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building* Papers* Semantic Parsing as Machine Translation (2013)* Grounding language with points and paths in continuous spaces (2014)* How much do word embeddings encode about syntax? (2014)* Translating neuralese (2017)* Analogs of linguistic structure in deep representations (2017)* Learning with latent language (2018)* Learning from Language (2018)* Measuring Compositionality in Representation Learning (2019)* Experience grounds language (2020)* Language Models as Agent Models (2022) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

Today, we're joined by Nicholas Carlini, research scientist at Google DeepMind to discuss adversarial machine learning and model security, focusing on his 2024 ICML best paper winner, “Stealing part of a production language model.” We dig into this work, which demonstrated the ability to successfully steal the last layer of production language models including ChatGPT and PaLM-2. Nicholas shares the current landscape of AI security research in the age of LLMs, the implications of model stealing, ethical concerns surrounding model privacy, how the attack works, and the significance of the embedding layer in language models. We also discuss the remediation strategies implemented by OpenAI and Google, and the future directions in the field of AI security. Plus, we also cover his other ICML 2024 best paper, “Position: Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining,” which questions the use and promotion of differential privacy in conjunction with pre-trained models. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/702.

Charli is joined by long time friend of the pod, Jeff Shiver this week to talk change.Jeff Shiver, CMRP guides people and organizations to overcome their reliability and operational challenges. Working together in partnership, we move beyond the status quo in culture, business results, and most importantly, people.  Jeff has over 25+ years of practitioner experience. Within Mars North America, he worked at four plant locations and held two corporate roles. Job functions included Engineering, Maintenance, and Operations management. Before Mars, he held contract engineering positions at Proctor and Gamble, and IBM. Founding People and Processes, Inc. in 2006, Jeff is a trusted advisor for the maintenance and reliability community. Certified in maintenance and reliability best practices, he holds the SMRP Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP), Asset Reliability Practitioner Cat I, II, & III, Certified Reliability Leader (CRL), AFE's Certified Professional Maintenance Manager (CPMM), ICML's Machinery Lubrication Technician (MLT), and is a certified RCM 2 & 3 Practitioner with The Aladon Network.  He is a book author, conference speaker, thought leader, and published in domestic and international trade journals. Jeff is also the past Membership Services Director for the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP). Jeff was recently listed as one of the top one hundred professionals to follow by Upkeep.  Read up at EmpoweringPumps.com and stay tuned for more news about EPIC at the Colorado School of Mines Nov 12th and 13th.Find us @EmpoweringPumps on Facebook, LinkedIn,  Instagram and Twitter and using the hashtag #EmpoweringIndustryPodcast or via email podcast@empoweringpumps.com 

Diesen Sommer haben wir uns aus der vertrauten Umgebung der CISPA-Büros herausgewagt und unsere Forscher zu ihren wichtigsten wissenschaftlichen Veranstaltungen begleitet: Konferenzen! Ende Juli fuhren wir nach Wien, um an der International Conference on Machine Learning teilzunehmen. Und da der Flur und die Gespräche dort ohnehin das Wichtigste an einer Konferenz sind, haben wir uns dort in einer Kaffeepause mit unseren Forscher:innen zusammengesetzt, um über ihre Forschung und das Neueste im Bereich des maschinellen Lernens zu sprechen. Unsere Gästin: Rebekka Burkholz, die 2021 zum CISPA kam und seitdem mit einem ERC-Starting Grant ausgezeichnet wurde, um mit ihrer Forschung neuronale Netzwerke effizienter zu machen. Im Podcast sprechen wir darüber, wie sie ihren wissenschaftlichen Hintergrund aus der Physik im Bereich KI anwendet und wie KI in Zukunft die Gesellschaft beeinflussen kann.

This summer, we ventured out of the safe and sound surroundings of the CISPA offices and accompanied our researchers to their most important science events: conferences! At the end of July, we went to Vienna to attend the International Conference on Machine Learning. And with the hallway and the conversations there being the most important part of a conference anyway, we sat down there with our researchers during a coffee break to talk about their research and the latest in machine learning. In this episode, we talk to Krikamol Muandet, who joined CISPA in 2022 and leads the Rational Intelligence Lab. His focus is on making AI truly intelligent – not just behaving like it is.

In this episode, Pedro Domingos - AI - 2040 - Lauren Hawker Zafer is joined by Pedro Domingos. This unique conversation explores AI's impact on politics, particularly in voter targeting and campaign strategies, and the concept of AI as a tool for enhancing collective intelligence. Domingos, with over 200 technical publications and numerous accolades, shares insights on the future of AI, its challenges, and opportunities. Who is Pedro Domingos? Pedro Domingos is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He is the author of the best-selling book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, 2015), which has been translated into over twelve languages and sold over 300,000 copies. He won the SIGKDD Innovation Award and the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, two of the highest honors in data science and AI. Domingos is Fellow of the AAAS and AAAI and received an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an IBM Faculty Award, several best paper awards, and other distinctions. Pedro received an undergraduate degree (1988) and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1992) from IST in Lisbon and an M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. Pedro is the author/co-author of over 200 technical publications in machine learning, data science, and other areas. He's a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal, co-founder of the International Machine Learning Society, and past associate editor of JAIR. He was the program co-chair of KDD-2003 and SRL-2009, and I've served on the program committees of AAAI, ICML, IJCAI, KDD, NIPS, SIGMOD, UAI, WWW, and others. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Spectator, Scientific American, Wired, and elsewhere. Lastly, Domingos helped start the fields of statistical relational AI, data stream mining, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration, and influence maximization in social networks. He lives in Seattle. #ai #techpodcast #redefiningai #squirro

Season Three - Spotlight Thirteen Our thirteenth spotlight of this season is a snippet of our upcoming episode: Pedro Domingos - AI - 2040 Join host Lauren Hawker Zafer as she engages with Pedro Domingos. This unique conversation explores AI's impact on politics, particularly in voter targeting and campaign strategies, and the concept of AI as a tool for enhancing collective intelligence. Domingos, with over 200 technical publications and numerous accolades, shares insights on the future of AI, its challenges, and opportunities. Who is Pedro Domingos? Pedro Domingos is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He is the author of the best-selling book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, 2015), which has been translated into over twelve languages and sold over 300,000 copies. He won the SIGKDD Innovation Award and theIJCAI John McCarthy Award, two of the highesthonors in data science and AI. Domingos is Fellow of the AAAS and AAAI and received an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an IBM Faculty Award, several best paper awards, and other distinctions. Pedro received an undergraduate degree (1988) and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1992) from IST in Lisbon and an M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. Pedro is the author/co-author of over 200 technical publications in machine learning, data science, and other areas. He's a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal, co-founder of the International Machine Learning Society, and past associate editor of JAIR. He was the program co-chair of KDD-2003 and SRL-2009, and I've served on the program committees of AAAI, ICML, IJCAI, KDD, NIPS, SIGMOD, UAI, WWW, and others. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Spectator, Scientific American, Wired, and elsewhere. Lastly, Domingos helped start the fields of statistical relational AI, data stream mining, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration, and influence maximization in social networks. He lives in Seattle. #ai #techpodcast #redefiningai #squirro

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How seriously should governments take the threat of existential risk from AI, given the lack of consensus among researchers? On the one hand, existential risks (x-risks) are necessarily somewhat speculative: by the time there is concrete evidence, it may be too late. On the other hand, governments must prioritize — after all, they don't worry too much about x-risk from alien invasions. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at brave.com/api. Sayash Kapoor is a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. His research focuses on the societal impact of AI. Kapoor has previously worked on AI in both industry and academia, with experience at Facebook, Columbia University, and EPFL Switzerland. He is a recipient of a best paper award at ACM FAccT and an impact recognition award at ACM CSCW. Notably, Kapoor was included in TIME's inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI. Sayash Kapoor https://x.com/sayashk https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sayashk/ Arvind Narayanan (other half of the AI Snake Oil duo) https://x.com/random_walker AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-existential-risk-probabilities Pre-order AI Snake Oil Book https://amzn.to/4fq2HGb AI Snake Oil blog https://www.aisnakeoil.com/ AI Agents That Matter https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01502 Shortcut learning in deep neural networks https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Shortcut-learning-in-deep-neural-networks-Geirhos-Jacobsen/1b04936c2599e59b120f743fbb30df2eed3fd782 77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2024/07/23/employees-report-ai-increased-workload/ TOC: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:57 How seriously should we take Xrisk threat? 00:02:55 Risk too unrealiable to inform policy 00:10:20 Overinflated risks 00:12:05 Perils of utility maximisation 00:13:55 Scaling vs airplane speeds 00:17:31 Shift to smaller models? 00:19:08 Commercial LLM ecosystem 00:22:10 Synthetic data 00:24:09 Is AI complexifying our jobs? 00:25:50 Does ChatGPT make us dumber or smarter? 00:26:55 Are AI Agents overhyped? 00:28:12 Simple vs complex baselines 00:30:00 Cost tradeoff in agent design 00:32:30 Model eval vs downastream perf 00:36:49 Shortcuts in metrics 00:40:09 Standardisation of agent evals 00:41:21 Humans in the loop 00:43:54 Levels of agent generality 00:47:25 ARC challenge

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pacing Outside the Box: RNNs Learn to Plan in Sokoban, published by Adrià Garriga-Alonso on July 25, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. Work done at FAR AI. There has been a lot of conceptual work on mesa-optimizers: neural networks that develop internal goals that may differ from their training objectives (the inner alignment problem). There is an abundance of good ideas for empirical work (find search in a NN, interpret it), but very little actual execution, partly because we did not have a clear-cut example of a mesa-optimizer to study. Until now.[1] We have replicated the mesa-optimizer that Guez et al. (2019) found, and released it open-source as a model organism for inner alignment research. In brief, Guez et al. trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) with model-free RL to play Sokoban. They noticed that if you give the RNN more time to think by repeating the initial observation at inference time, its performance increases. This is highly suggestive of planning! We investigate this "planning effect" in a black-box way. We find that often, the RNN learns to "pace" before attempting to solve the level, likely to get more computation and find a solution. When we give the RNN time to think, it finds the solution in the extra thinking time and executes it straight away. In other cases, the RNN sometimes starts with a greedy solution and locks itself out of the solution. With thinking time, the RNN finds the non-myopic solution, avoiding the lock and solving the level. Note that this greedy behavior may be bounded-rational given the -0.1 penalty per step: solving fewer levels but solving them more quickly can pay off. These are illustrative examples, but we have quantitative evidence too. We operationalize the pacing behavior as whatever creates a cycle in the sequence of environment states. If we give the RNN time to think at level start, it does not 'pace' anymore: 75% of cycles that occur in the first 5 steps disappear. Time to think in the middle of a level also substitutes cycles: 82% of N-step cycles disappear with N steps to think. The levels we use always have 4 boxes. Thinking time barely changes the average time the RNN takes to place boxes 1-3. But, when filtering only to levels that it cannot solve at 0 steps but can solve at 6 thinking steps, the time to place boxes 1-3 greatly increases, even though the time to place the 4th box barely changes. This indicates the NN is greedy by default, and thinking time remedies that. Understanding how neural networks reason, and ultimately locating where they evaluate plans, is crucial to solving inner alignment. This represents an important first step in our longer-term research agenda to automatically detect mesa-optimizers, understand their goals, and modify the goals or planning procedures to align with the intended objective. For more information, read our blog post or full paper "Planning behavior in a recurrent neural network that plays Sokoban." And, if you're at ICML, come talk to us at the Mechanistic Interpretability workshop on Saturday! If you are interested in working on problems in AI safety, we're hiring. We're also open to exploring collaborations with researchers at other institutions - just reach out at hello@far.ai. 1. ^ We believe LeelaChess is likely also planning. Thanks to Jenner et al., we have a handle on where the values may be represented and a starting place to understand the planning algorithm. However, it is likely to be much more complicated than the RNN we present, and it is not clearly doing iterative planning. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: You should go to ML conferences, published by Jan Kulveit on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. This is second kind of obvious point to make, but if you are interested in AI, AI safety, or cognition in general, it is likely worth going to top ML conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR. In this post I cover some reasons why, and some anecdotal stories. 1. Parts of AI alignment and safety are now completely mainstream Looking at the "Best paper awards" at ICML, you'll find these safety-relevant or alignment-relevant papers: Stealing part of a production language model by Carlini et al. Probabilistic Inference in Language Models via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo by Zhao et al. Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers by Khan et al. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments Bruce et al. which amounts to about one-third (!). "Because of safety concerns" is part of the motivation for hundreds of papers. While the signal-to-noise ratio is even worse than on LessWrong, in total, the amount you can learn is higher - my personal guess is there is maybe 2-3x as much prosaic AI safety relevant work at conferences than what you get by just following LessWrong, Alignment Forum and safety-oriented communication channels. 2. Conferences are an efficient way how to screen general ML research without spending a lot of time on X Almost all papers are presented in the form of posters. In case of a big conference, this usually means many thousands of posters presented in huge poster sessions. My routine for engaging with this firehose of papers: 1. For each session, read all the titles. Usually, this prunes it by a factor of ten (i.e. from 600 papers to 60). 2. Read the abstracts. Prune it to things which I haven't noticed before and seem relevant. For me, this is usually by a factor of ~3-5. 3. Visit the posters. Posters with paper authors present are actually a highly efficient way how to digest research: Sometimes, you suspect there is some assumption or choice hidden somewhere making the result approximately irrelevant - just asking can often resolve this in a matter of tens of seconds. Posters themselves don't undergo peer review which makes the communication more honest, with less hedging. Usually authors of a paper know significantly more about the problem than what's in the paper, and you can learn more about negative results, obstacles, or directions people are excited about. Clear disadvantage of conferences is the time lag; by the time they are presented, some of the main results are old and well known, but in my view a lot of the value is the long tail of results which are sometimes very useful, but not attention grabbing. 3. ML research community as a control group My vague impression is that in conceptual research, mainstream ML research lags behind LW/AI safety community by something between 1 to 5 years, rediscovering topics discussed here. Some examples: ICML poster & oral presentation The Platonic Representation Hypothesis is an independent version of Natural abstractions discussed here for about 4 years. A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignment deals with Self-unalignment problem and Coherent extrapolated volition Plenty of research on safety protocols like debate, IDA,... Prior work published in the LW/AI safety community is almost never cited or acknowledged - in some cases because it is more convenient to claim the topic is completely novel, but I suspect in many cases researchers are genuinely not aware of the existing work, which makes their contribution a useful control: if someone starts thinking about these topics, unaware of the thousands hours spent on them by dozens of people, what will they arrive at? 4. What 'experts' think ML research community is the intellectual home of many people expressing public opinions about AI risk. In my view, b...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: You should go to ML conferences, published by Jan Kulveit on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. This is second kind of obvious point to make, but if you are interested in AI, AI safety, or cognition in general, it is likely worth going to top ML conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR. In this post I cover some reasons why, and some anecdotal stories. 1. Parts of AI alignment and safety are now completely mainstream Looking at the "Best paper awards" at ICML, you'll find these safety-relevant or alignment-relevant papers: Stealing part of a production language model by Carlini et al. Probabilistic Inference in Language Models via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo by Zhao et al. Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers by Khan et al. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments Bruce et al. which amounts to about one-third (!). "Because of safety concerns" is part of the motivation for hundreds of papers. While the signal-to-noise ratio is even worse than on LessWrong, in total, the amount you can learn is higher - my personal guess is there is maybe 2-3x as much prosaic AI safety relevant work at conferences than what you get by just following LessWrong, Alignment Forum and safety-oriented communication channels. 2. Conferences are an efficient way how to screen general ML research without spending a lot of time on X Almost all papers are presented in the form of posters. In case of a big conference, this usually means many thousands of posters presented in huge poster sessions. My routine for engaging with this firehose of papers: 1. For each session, read all the titles. Usually, this prunes it by a factor of ten (i.e. from 600 papers to 60). 2. Read the abstracts. Prune it to things which I haven't noticed before and seem relevant. For me, this is usually by a factor of ~3-5. 3. Visit the posters. Posters with paper authors present are actually a highly efficient way how to digest research: Sometimes, you suspect there is some assumption or choice hidden somewhere making the result approximately irrelevant - just asking can often resolve this in a matter of tens of seconds. Posters themselves don't undergo peer review which makes the communication more honest, with less hedging. Usually authors of a paper know significantly more about the problem than what's in the paper, and you can learn more about negative results, obstacles, or directions people are excited about. Clear disadvantage of conferences is the time lag; by the time they are presented, some of the main results are old and well known, but in my view a lot of the value is the long tail of results which are sometimes very useful, but not attention grabbing. 3. ML research community as a control group My vague impression is that in conceptual research, mainstream ML research lags behind LW/AI safety community by something between 1 to 5 years, rediscovering topics discussed here. Some examples: ICML poster & oral presentation The Platonic Representation Hypothesis is an independent version of Natural abstractions discussed here for about 4 years. A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignment deals with Self-unalignment problem and Coherent extrapolated volition Plenty of research on safety protocols like debate, IDA,... Prior work published in the LW/AI safety community is almost never cited or acknowledged - in some cases because it is more convenient to claim the topic is completely novel, but I suspect in many cases researchers are genuinely not aware of the existing work, which makes their contribution a useful control: if someone starts thinking about these topics, unaware of the thousands hours spent on them by dozens of people, what will they arrive at? 4. What 'experts' think ML research community is the intellectual home of many people expressing public opinions about AI risk. In my view, b...

Dr. Rosanne Liu, Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and co-founder of the ML Collective, shares her journey and the mission to democratize AI research. She explains her pioneering work on intrinsic dimensions in deep learning and the advantages of curiosity-driven research. Jon and Dr. Liu also explore the complexities of understanding powerful AI models, the specifics of character-aware text encoding, and the significant impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the ML community. With publications in NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and Science, Dr. Liu offers her expertise and vision for the future of machine learning. Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information. In this episode you will learn: • How the ML Collective came about [03:31] • The concept of a failure CV [16:12] • ML Collective research topics [19:03] • How Dr. Liu's work on the “intrinsic dimension” of deep learning models inspired the now-standard LoRA approach to fine-tuning LLMs [21:28] • The pros and cons of curiosity-driven vs. goal-driven ML research [29:08] • Discussion on Dr. Liu's research and papers [33:17] • Character-aware vs. character-blind text encoding [54:59] • The positive impacts of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the ML community [57:51] Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/797

In this podcast episode, Diana and Nicole discuss the evolving role of AI chatbots in various writing contexts, particularly in academia and genealogy. They highlight the changing policies around the use of large language models (LLMs) in academic writing, noting how organizations like the International Conference on Machine Learning have shifted from prohibiting to allowing LLMs, provided that authors are responsible for the content and its integrity. They delve into the ethical considerations of using AI in genealogy writing, especially for projects that are meant for accreditation or professional certification. They stress the importance of originality and caution against claiming AI-generated work as one's own, citing ethical guidelines that discourage taking credit for others' contributions, including those made by AI. Nicole created this summary with ChatGPT 4. Links Disclosing Use of AI for Writing Assistance in Genealogy - https://familylocket.com/disclosing-use-of-ai-for-writing-assistance-in-genealogy/ Program Chairs for the International Conference on Machine Learning, “ICML 2024,” icml.cc, 2024, https://icml.cc/Conferences/2024/CallForPapers. See also Program Chairs for the International Conference on Machine Learning, “International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023,” icml.cc, 2023, https://icml.cc/Conferences/2023/llm-policy. Mohammad Hosseini, David B Resnik, and Kristi Holmes, “The Ethics of Disclosing the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Writing Scholarly Manuscripts,” Research Ethics 19, no. 4 (June 15, 2023): 449–65, https://doi.org/10.1177/17470161231180449. Gregory E Kaebnick et al., “Editors' Statement on the Responsible Use of Generative AI Technologies in Scholarly Journal Publishing,” Hastings Center Report 53, no. 5 (September 1, 2023): 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1507. Lindsey Passenger Wieck, “Revising Historical Writing Using Generative AI: An Editorial Experiment,” www.historians.org, August 15, 2023, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/summer-2023/revising-historical-writing-using-generative-ai-an-editorial-experiment. Sponsor – Newspapers.com For listeners of this podcast, Newspapers.com is offering new subscribers 20% off a Publisher Extra subscription so you can start exploring today. Just use the code “FamilyLocket” at checkout.  Research Like a Pro Resources Airtable Universe - Nicole's Airtable Templates - https://www.airtable.com/universe/creator/usrsBSDhwHyLNnP4O/nicole-dyer Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference - by Nicole Dyer - https://familylocket.com/product/airtable-research-logs-for-genealogy-quick-reference/ Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist's Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com - https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d 14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge Workbook - digital - https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-digital-only/ and spiral bound - https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-spiral-bound/ Research Like a Pro Webinar Series 2024 - monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence - https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2024/ Research Like a Pro eCourse - independent study course -  https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/ RLP Study Group - upcoming group and email notification list - https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/ Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist's Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin - https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse - independent study course -  https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/ RLP with DNA Study Group - upcoming group and email notification list - https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/ Thank you

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The case for stopping AI safety research, published by catubc on May 24, 2024 on LessWrong. TLDR: AI systems are failing in obvious and manageable ways for now. Fixing them will push the failure modes beyond our ability to understand and anticipate, let alone fix. The AI safety community is also doing a huge economic service to developers. Our belief that our minds can "fix" a super-intelligence - especially bit by bit - needs to be re-thought. I wanted to write this post forever, but now seems like a good time. The case is simple, I hope it takes you 1min to read. 1. AI safety research is still solving easy problems. We are patching up the most obvious (to us) problems. As time goes we will no longer be able to play this existential risk game of chess with AI systems. I've argued this a lot (preprint; ICML paper accepted (shorter read, will repost), will be out in a few days; www.agencyfoundations.ai). Seems others have this thought. 2. Capability development is getting AI safety research for free. It's likely in the millions to tens of millions of dollars. All the "hackathons", and "mini" prizes to patch something up or propose a new way for society to digest/adjust to some new normal (and increasingly incentivizing existing academic labs). 3. AI safety research is speeding up capabilities. I hope this is somewhat obvious to most. I write this now because in my view we are about 5-7 years before massive human biometric and neural datasets will enter our AI training. These will likely generate amazing breakthroughs in long-term planning and emotional and social understanding of the human world. They will also most likely increase x-risk radically. Stopping AI safety research or taking it in-house with security guarantees etc, will slow down capabilities somewhat - and may expose capabilities developers more directly to public opinion of still manageable harmful outcomes. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop Happening at ICML 2024!, published by Neel Nanda on May 3, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. Announcing the first academic Mechanistic Interpretability workshop, held at ICML 2024! We'd love to get papers submitted if any of you have relevant projects! Deadline May 29, max 4 or max 8 pages. We welcome anything that brings us closer to a principled understanding of model internals, even if it's not "traditional" mech interp. Check out our website for example topics! There's $1750 in best paper prizes. We also welcome less standard submissions, like open source software, models or datasets, negative results, distillations, or position pieces. And if anyone is attending ICML, you'd be very welcome at the workshop! We have a great speaker line-up: Chris Olah, Jacob Steinhardt, David Bau and Asma Ghandeharioun. And a panel discussion, hands-on tutorial, and social. I'm excited to meet more people into mech interp! And if you know anyone who might be interested in attending/submitting, please pass this on. Twitter thread, Website Thanks to my great co-organisers: Fazl Barez, Lawrence Chan, Kayo Yin, Mor Geva, Atticus Geiger and Max Tegmark Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Industrial Talk is onsite at SMRP 31 and talking to Paul Hiller, Marketing Manager at  International Council of Machinery Lubrication about "Machinery lubrication to ensure asset perform at their peak".  Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation: Industrial innovation and problem-solving at SMRP conference. 0:04 Scott Mackenzie welcomes listeners to the SMRP conference in Orlando, highlighting the innovative problem solvers and collaborators in attendance. Lubrication certification and its importance. 1:14 Paul, Marketing Manager at ICML, discusses certification body for lubrication practitioners and oil analysts. Practitioners are the weak link in lubrication certification, as they are often overlooked and underappreciated. Lubrication industry standards and certification. 4:30 ICML provides standards for lubrication training and certification, helping to level the playing field for all candidates. ICML does not develop custom exams for individuals, but offers educational components to complement the standards. Training providers must meet ISO standards and sign an agreement to ensure ethical practices. Developing a standard for lubrication management. 8:43 ICML developed the 55 standard in response to ISO 55,000 to bridge the gap between concepts and shop floor practicality. Paul highlights the challenges of implementing lubrication management systems, including resistance from plant managers who prioritize their own needs over industry standards. Asset management and reliability at an industry conference. 13:34 Scott MacKenzie interviews Paul from the International Council of Machinery Lubrication about the importance of asset management, maintenance, and reliability in industry. Paul provides information on how to access the council's resources and conference information, and encourages listeners to reach out to him and the organization for more information. If interested in being on the Industrial Talk show, simply contact us and let's have a quick conversation. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Marketing Process Course” for Greater Success in 2024. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy! PAUL HILLER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:...

In 2023 we did a few Fundamentals episodes covering Benchmarks 101, Datasets 101, FlashAttention, and Transformers Math, and it turns out those were some of your evergreen favorites! So we are experimenting with more educational/survey content in the mix alongside our regular founder and event coverage. Pls request more!We have a new calendar for events; join to be notified of upcoming things in 2024!Today we visit the shoggoth mask factory: how do transformer models go from trawling a deeply learned latent space for next-token prediction to a helpful, honest, harmless chat assistant? Our guest “lecturer” today is ; you might know him from his prolific online writing on and Twitter, or from his previous work leading RLHF at HuggingFace and now at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) which recently released the open source GPT3.5-class Tulu 2 model which was trained with DPO. He's widely considered one of the most knowledgeable people on RLHF and RLAIF. He recently gave an “RLHF 201” lecture at Stanford, so we invited him on the show to re-record it for everyone to enjoy! You can find the full slides here, which you can use as reference through this episode. Full video with synced slidesFor audio-only listeners, this episode comes with slide presentation along our discussion. You can find it on our YouTube (like, subscribe, tell a friend, et al).Theoretical foundations of RLHFThe foundation and assumptions that go into RLHF go back all the way to Aristotle (and you can find guidance for further research in the slide below) but there are two key concepts that will be helpful in thinking through this topic and LLMs in general:* Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem: you can dive into the math here, but the TLDR is that when humans make decision there's usually a “maximum utility” function that measures what the best decision would be; the fact that this function exists, makes it possible for RLHF to model human preferences and decision making.* Bradley-Terry model: given two items A and B from a population, you can model the probability that A will be preferred to B (or vice-versa). In our world, A and B are usually two outputs from an LLM (or at the lowest level, the next token). It turns out that from this minimal set of assumptions, you can build up the mathematical foundations supporting the modern RLHF paradigm!The RLHF loopOne important point Nathan makes is that "for many tasks we want to solve, evaluation of outcomes is easier than producing the correct behavior". For example, it might be difficult for you to write a poem, but it's really easy to say if you like or dislike a poem someone else wrote. Going back to the Bradley-Terry Model we mentioned, the core idea behind RLHF is that when given two outputs from a model, you will be able to say which of the two you prefer, and we'll then re-encode that preference into the model.An important point that Nathan mentions is that when you use these preferences to change model behavior "it doesn't mean that the model believes these things. It's just trained to prioritize these things". When you have preference for a model to not return instructions on how to write a computer virus for example, you're not erasing the weights that have that knowledge, but you're simply making it hard for that information to surface by prioritizing answers that don't return it. We'll talk more about this in our future Fine Tuning 101 episode as we break down how information is stored in models and how fine-tuning affects it.At a high level, the loop looks something like this:For many RLHF use cases today, we can assume the model we're training is already instruction-tuned for chat or whatever behavior the model is looking to achieve. In the "Reward Model & Other Infrastructure" we have multiple pieces:Reward + Preference ModelThe reward model is trying to signal to the model how much it should change its behavior based on the human preference, subject to a KL constraint. The preference model itself scores the pairwise preferences from the same prompt (worked better than scalar rewards).One way to think about it is that the reward model tells the model how big of a change this new preference should make in the behavior in absolute terms, while the preference model calculates how big of a difference there is between the two outputs in relative terms. A lot of this derives from John Schulman's work on PPO:We recommend watching him talk about it in the video above, and also Nathan's pseudocode distillation of the process:Feedback InterfacesUnlike the "thumbs up/down" buttons in ChatGPT, data annotation from labelers is much more thorough and has many axis of judgement. At a simple level, the LLM generates two outputs, A and B, for a given human conversation. It then asks the labeler to use a Likert scale to score which one it preferred, and by how much:Through the labeling process, there are many other ways to judge a generation:We then use all of this data to train a model from the preference pairs we have. We start from the base instruction-tuned model, and then run training in which the loss of our gradient descent is the difference between the good and the bad prompt.Constitutional AI (RLAIF, model-as-judge)As these models have gotten more sophisticated, people started asking the question of whether or not humans are actually a better judge of harmfulness, bias, etc, especially at the current price of data labeling. Anthropic's work on the "Constitutional AI" paper is using models to judge models. This is part of a broader "RLAIF" space: Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback.By using a "constitution" that the model has to follow, you are able to generate fine-tuning data for a new model that will be RLHF'd on this constitution principles. The RLHF model will then be able to judge outputs of models to make sure that they follow its principles:Emerging ResearchRLHF is still a nascent field, and there are a lot of different research directions teams are taking; some of the newest and most promising / hyped ones:* Rejection sampling / Best of N Sampling: the core idea here is that rather than just scoring pairwise generations, you are generating a lot more outputs (= more inference cost), score them all with your reward model and then pick the top N results. LLaMA2 used this approach, amongst many others.* Process reward models: in Chain of Thought generation, scoring each step in the chain and treating it like its own state rather than just scoring the full output. This is most effective in fields like math that inherently require step-by-step reasoning.* Direct Preference Optimization (DPO): We covered DPO in our NeurIPS Best Papers recap, and Nathan has a whole blog post on this; DPO isn't technically RLHF as it doesn't have the RL part, but it's the “GPU Poor” version of it. Mistral-Instruct was a DPO model, as do Intel's Neural Chat and StableLM Zephyr. Expect to see a lot more variants in 2024 given how “easy” this was.* Superalignment: OpenAI launched research on weak-to-strong generalization which we briefly discuss at the 1hr mark.Note: Nathan also followed up this post with RLHF resources from his and peers' work:Show Notes* Full RLHF Slides* Interconnects* Retort (podcast)* von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem* Bradley-Terry model (pairwise preferences model)* Constitutional AI* Tamer (2008 paper by Bradley Knox and Peter Stone)* Paul Christiano et al. RLHF paper* InstructGPT* Eureka by Jim Fan* ByteDance / OpenAI lawsuit* AlpacaEval* MTBench* TruthfulQA (evaluation tool)* Self-Instruct Paper* Open Assistant* Louis Castricato* Nazneen Rajani* Tulu (DPO model from the Allen Institute)Timestamps* [00:00:00] Introductions and background on the lecture origins* [00:05:17] History of RL and its applications* [00:10:09] Intellectual history of RLHF* [00:13:47] RLHF for decision-making and pre-deep RL vs deep RL* [00:20:19] Initial papers and intuitions around RLHF* [00:27:57] The three phases of RLHF* [00:31:09] Overfitting issues* [00:34:47] How preferences get defined* [00:40:35] Ballpark on LLaMA2 costs* [00:42:50] Synthetic data for training* [00:47:25] Technical deep dive in the RLHF process* [00:54:34] Projection / best event sampling* [00:57:49] Constitutional AI* [01:04:13] DPO* [01:08:54] What's the Allen Institute for AI?* [01:13:43] Benchmarks and models comparisonsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:15]: Hey, and today we have Dr. Nathan Lambert in the house. Welcome.Nathan [00:00:18]: Thanks guys.Swyx [00:00:19]: You didn't have to come too far. You got your PhD in Berkeley, and it seems like you've lived there most of the time in recent years. You worked on robotics and model-based reinforcement learning on your PhD, and you also interned at FAIR and DeepMind. You bootstrapped the RLHF team at Hugging Face, and you recently joined the Allen Institute as a research scientist. So that's your quick bio. What should people know about you that maybe is not super obvious about you on New LinkedIn?Nathan [00:00:43]: I stay sane in various insane sport and ultra-endurance sport activities that I do.Swyx [00:00:50]: What's an ultra-endurance sport activity?Nathan [00:00:52]: Long-distance trail running or gravel biking. Try to unplug sometimes, although it's harder these days. Yeah.Swyx [00:00:59]: Well, you know, just the Bay Area is just really good for that stuff, right?Nathan [00:01:02]: Oh, yeah. You can't beat it. I have a trailhead like 1.2 miles from my house, which is pretty unmatchable in any other urban area.Swyx [00:01:11]: Pretty excellent. You also have an incredible blog, Interconnects, which I'm a fan of. And I also just recently discovered that you have a new podcast, Retort.Nathan [00:01:20]: Yeah, we do. I've been writing for a while, and I feel like I've finally started to write things that are understandable and fun. After a few years lost in the wilderness, if you ask some of my friends that I made read the earlier blogs, they're like, oh, this is yikes, but it's coming along. And the podcast is with my friend Tom, and we just kind of like riff on what's actually happening on AI and not really do news recaps, but just what it all means and have a more critical perspective on the things that really are kind of funny, but still very serious happening in the world of machine learning.Swyx [00:01:52]: Yeah. Awesome. So let's talk about your work. What would you highlight as your greatest hits so far on Interconnects, at least?Nathan [00:01:59]: So the ones that are most popular are timely and or opinion pieces. So the first real breakout piece was when April and I also just wrote down the thing that everyone in AI was feeling, which is we're all feeling stressed, that we're going to get scooped, and that we're overworked, which is behind the curtain, what it feels to work in AI. And then a similar one, which we might touch on later in this, was about my recent job search, which wasn't the first time I wrote a job search post. People always love that stuff. It's so open. I mean, it's easy for me to do in a way that it's very on-brand, and it's very helpful. I understand that until you've done it, it's hard to share this information. And then the other popular ones are various model training techniques or fine tuning. There's an early one on RLHF, which is, this stuff is all just like when I figure it out in my brain. So I wrote an article that's like how RLHF actually works, which is just the intuitions that I had put together in the summer about RLHF, and that was pretty well. And then I opportunistically wrote about QSTAR, which I hate that you have to do it, but it is pretty funny. From a literature perspective, I'm like, open AI publishes on work that is very related to mathematical reasoning. So it's like, oh, you just poke a little around what they've already published, and it seems pretty reasonable. But we don't know. They probably just got like a moderate bump on one of their benchmarks, and then everyone lost their minds. It doesn't really matter.Swyx [00:03:15]: You're like, this is why Sam Altman was fired. I don't know. Anyway, we're here to talk about RLHF 101. You did a presentation, and I think you expressed some desire to rerecord it. And that's why I reached out on Twitter saying, like, why not rerecord it with us, and then we can ask questions and talk about it. Yeah, sounds good.Nathan [00:03:30]: I try to do it every six or 12 months is my estimated cadence, just to refine the ways that I say things. And people will see that we don't know that much more, but we have a bit of better way of saying what we don't know.Swyx [00:03:43]: Awesome. We can dive right in. I don't know if there's any other topics that we want to lay out as groundwork.Alessio [00:03:48]: No, you have some awesome slides. So for people listening on podcast only, we're going to have the slides on our show notes, and then we're going to have a YouTube version where we run through everything together.Nathan [00:03:59]: Sounds good. Yeah. I think to start skipping a lot of the, like, what is a language model stuff, everyone knows that at this point. I think the quote from the Llama 2 paper is a great kind of tidbit on RLHF becoming like a real deal. There was some uncertainty earlier in the year about whether or not RLHF was really going to be important. I think it was not that surprising that it is. I mean, with recent models still using it, the signs were there, but the Llama 2 paper essentially reads like a bunch of NLP researchers that were skeptical and surprised. So the quote from the paper was, meanwhile, reinforcement learning known for its instability seemed a somewhat shadowy field for those in the NLP research community. However, reinforcement learning proved highly effective, particularly given its cost and time effectiveness. So you don't really know exactly what the costs and time that Meta is looking at, because they have a huge team and a pretty good amount of money here to release these Llama models. This is just the kind of thing that we're seeing now. I think any major company that wasn't doing RLHF is now realizing they have to have a team around this. At the same time, we don't have a lot of that in the open and research communities at the same scale. I think seeing that converge would be great, but it's still very early days. And the other thing on the slide is some of Anthropic's work, but everyone knows Anthropic is kind of the masters of this, and they have some of their own techniques that we're going to talk about later on, but that's kind of where we start.Alessio [00:05:17]: Can we do just a one-second RL version? So you come from a robotics background, which RL used to be, or maybe still is, state-of-the-art. And then now you're seeing a lot of LLM plus RL, so you have the gym fans, Eureka, you have MPU, which we had on the podcast when they started with RL. Now they're doing RL plus LLMs. Yeah. Any thoughts there on how we got here? Maybe how the pendulum will keep swinging?Nathan [00:05:46]: I really think RL is about a framing of viewing the world through trial and error learning and feedback, and really just one that's focused on thinking about decision-making and inputs in the world and how inputs have reactions. And in that, a lot of people come from a lot of different backgrounds, whether it's physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. There are obviously computer scientists, but compared to other fields of CS, I do think it's a much more diverse background of people. My background was in electrical engineering and doing robotics and things like that. It really just changes the worldview. I think that reinforcement learning as it was back then, so to say, is really different. You're looking at these toy problems and the numbers are totally different, and everyone went kind of zero to one at scaling these things up, but people like Jim Phan and other people that were... You saw this transition in the decision transformer and papers and when people are trying to use transformers to do decision-making for things like offline RL, and I think that was kind of like the early days. But then once language models were so proven, it's like everyone is using this tool for their research. I think in the long run, it will still settle out, or RL will still be a field that people work on just because of these kind of fundamental things that I talked about. It's just viewing the whole problem formulation different than predicting text, and so there needs to be that separation. And the view of RL in language models is pretty contrived already, so it's not like we're doing real RL. I think the last slide that I have here is a way to make RLHF more like what people would think of with RL, so actually running things over time, but a weird lineage of tools that happen to get us to where we are, so that's why the name takes up so much space, but it could have gone a lot of different ways. Cool.Alessio [00:07:29]: We made it one slide before going on a tangent.Nathan [00:07:31]: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of related. This is a...Swyx [00:07:35]: Yeah, so we have a history of RL.Nathan [00:07:37]: Yeah, so to give the context, this paper really started because I have this more diverse background than some computer scientists, such as trying to understand what the difference of a cost function or a reward function and a preference function would be without going into all of the details. Costs are normally things that control theorists would work with in these kind of closed domains, and then reinforcement learning has always worked with rewards that's central to the formulation that we'll see, and then the idea was like, okay, we now are at preferences, and each step along the way there's kind of different assumptions that you're making. We'll get into these, and those assumptions are built on other fields of work. So that's what this slide is going to say, it's like RLHF, while directly building on tools from RL and language models, is really implicitly impacted and built on theories and philosophies spanning tons of human history. I think we cite Aristotle in this paper, which is fun. It's like going pre-BC, it's like 2,300 years old or something like that. So that's the reason to do this, I think. We kind of list some things in the paper about summarizing what different presumptions of RLHF could be. I think going through these is actually kind of funny. It's fun to talk about these, because they're kind of grab bags of things that you'll see return throughout this podcast that we're talking about it. The core thing of RLHF that, in order to be a believer in this, is that RL actually works. It's like, if you have a reward function, you can optimize it in some way and get a different performance out of it, and you could do this at scale, and you could do this in really complex environments, which is, I don't know how to do that in all the domains. I don't know how to exactly make chat GPT. So it's kind of, we'll overshadow everything. And then there's, go from something kind of obvious like that, and then you read the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem, which is essentially an economic theory that says you can weight different probabilities of different people, which is a theoretical piece of work that is the foundation of utilitarianism, and trying to quantify preferences is crucial to doing any sort of RLHF. And if you look into this, all of these things, there's way more you could go into if you're interested in any of these. So this is kind of like grabbing a few random things, and then kind of similar to that is the Bradley-Terry model, which is the fancy name for the pairwise preferences that everyone is doing. And then all the things that are like, that Anthropic and OpenAI figured out that you can do, which is that you can aggregate preferences from a bunch of different people and different sources. And then when you actually do RLHF, you extract things from that data, and then you train a model that works somehow. And we don't know, there's a lot of complex links there, but if you want to be a believer in doing this at scale, these are the sorts of things that you have to accept as preconditions for doing RLHF. Yeah.Swyx [00:10:09]: You have a nice chart of like the sort of intellectual history of RLHF that we'll send people to refer to either in your paper or in the YouTube video for this podcast. But I like the other slide that you have on like the presumptions that you need to have for RLHF to work. You already mentioned some of those. Which one's underappreciated? Like, this is the first time I've come across the VNM Utility Theorem.Nathan [00:10:29]: Yeah, I know. This is what you get from working with people like to my co-host on the podcast, the rhetoric is that sociologist by training. So he knows all these things and like who the philosophers are that found these different things like utilitarianism. But there's a lot that goes into this. Like essentially there's even economic theories that like there's debate whether or not preferences exist at all. And there's like different types of math you can use with whether or not you actually can model preferences at all. So it's pretty obvious that RLHF is built on the math that thinks that you can actually model any human preference. But this is the sort of thing that's been debated for a long time. So all the work that's here is like, and people hear about in their AI classes. So like Jeremy Bentham, like hedonic calculus and all these things like these are the side of work where people assume that preferences can be measured. And this is like, I don't really know, like, this is what I kind of go on a rant and I say that in RLHF calling things a preference model is a little annoying because there's no inductive bias of what a preference is. It's like if you were to learn a robotic system and you learned a dynamics model, like hopefully that actually mirrors the world in some way of the dynamics. But with a preference model, it's like, Oh my God, I don't know what this model, like I don't know what chat GPT encodes as any sort of preference or what I would want it to be in a fair way. Anthropic has done more work on trying to write these things down. But even like if you look at Claude's constitution, like that doesn't mean the model believes these things. It's just trained to prioritize these things. And that's kind of what the later points I'm looking at, like what RLHF is doing and if it's actually like a repeatable process in the data and in the training, that's just unknown. And we have a long way to go before we understand what this is and the link between preference data and any notion of like writing down a specific value.Alessio [00:12:05]: The disconnect between more sociology work versus computer work already exists, or is it like a recent cross contamination? Because when we had Tri Dao on the podcast, he said FlashAttention came to be because at Hazy they have so much overlap between systems engineer and like deep learning engineers. Is it the same in this field?Nathan [00:12:26]: So I've gone to a couple of workshops for the populations of people who you'd want to include this like R. I think the reason why it's not really talked about is just because the RLHF techniques that people use were built in labs like OpenAI and DeepMind where there are some of these people. These places do a pretty good job of trying to get these people in the door when you compare them to like normal startups. But like they're not bringing in academics from economics, like social choice theory. There's just too much. Like the criticism of this paper that this is based on is like, oh, you're missing these things in RL or at least this decade of RL and it's like it would be literally be bigger than the Sutton and Barto book if you were to include everyone. So it's really hard to include everyone in a principled manner when you're designing this. It's just a good way to understand and improve the communication of what RLHF is and like what is a good reward model for society. It really probably comes down to what an individual wants and it'll probably motivate models to move more in that direction and just be a little bit better about the communication, which is a recurring theme and kind of my work is like I just get frustrated when people say things that don't really make sense, especially when it's going to manipulate individual's values or manipulate the general view of AI or anything like this. So that's kind of why RLHF is so interesting. It's very vague in what it's actually doing while the problem specification is very general.Swyx [00:13:42]: Shall we go to the, I guess, the diagram here on the reinforcement learning basics? Yeah.Nathan [00:13:47]: So reinforcement learning, I kind of mentioned this, it's a trial and error type of system. The diagram and the slides is really this classic thing where you have an agent interacting with an environment. So it's kind of this agent has some input to the environment, which is called the action. The environment returns a state and a reward and that repeats over time and the agent learns based on these states and these rewards that it's seeing and it should learn a policy that makes the rewards go up. That seems pretty simple than if you try to mentally map what this looks like in language, which is that like the language models don't make this easy. I think with the language model, it's very hard to define what an environment is. So if the language model is the policy and it's generating, it's like the environment should be a human, but setting up the infrastructure to take tens of thousands of prompts and generate them and then show them to a human and collect the human responses and then shove that into your training architecture is very far away from working. So we don't really have an environment. We just have a reward model that returns a reward and the state doesn't really exist when you look at it like an RL problem. What happens is the state is a prompt and then you do a completion and then you throw it away and you grab a new prompt. We're really in as an RL researcher, you would think of this as being like you take a state, you get some completion from it and then you look at what that is and you keep kind of iterating on it and all of that isn't here, which is why you'll hear RLHF referred to as bandits problem, which is kind of like you choose one action and then you watch the dynamics play out. There's many more debates that you can have in this. If you get the right RL people in the room, then kind of like this is an RL even when you zoom into what RLHF is doing.Alessio [00:15:22]: Does this change as you think about a chain of thought reasoning and things like that? Like does the state become part of the chain that you're going through?Nathan [00:15:29]: There's work that I've mentioned on one slide called process reward models that essentially rewards each step in the chain of thought reasoning. It doesn't really give the part of interaction, but it does make it a little bit more fine grained where you can think about like calling it at least you have many states from your initial state. That formulation I don't think people have fully settled on. I think there's a bunch of great work out there, like even OpenAI is releasing a lot of this and let's verify step by step is there pretty great paper on the matter. I think in the next year that'll probably get made more concrete by the community on like if you can easily draw out like if chain of thought reasoning is more like RL, we can talk about that more later. That's a kind of a more advanced topic than we probably should spend all the time on.Swyx [00:16:13]: RLHF for decision making. You have a slide here that compares pre-deep RL versus deep RL.Nathan [00:16:19]: This is getting into the history of things, which is showing that the work that people are using now really came from well outside of NLP and it came before deep learning was big. Next up from this paper, Tamer, which is from 2008. Some names that are still really relevant in kind of human centric RL, Bradley Knox and Peter Stone. If you have an agent take an action, you would just have a human give a score from zero to one as a reward rather than having a reward function. And then with that classifier, you can do something with a policy that learns to take actions to maximize that reward. It's a pretty simple setup. It works in simple domains. And then the reason why this is interesting is you compare it to the paper that everyone knows, which is this Paul Christiano et al. Deep Reinforced Learning from Human Preferences paper, which is where they showed that learning from human preferences, you can solve like the basic RL tasks at the time. So various control problems and simulation and this kind of like human preferences approach had higher rewards in some environments than if you just threw RL at the environment that returned a reward. So the preferences thing was you took two trajectories. So in this case, it was like complete trajectories of the agent and the human was labeling which one is better. You can see how this kind of comes to be like the pairwise preferences that are used today that we'll talk about. And there's also a really kind of interesting nugget that is the trajectory that the humans were labeling over has a lot more information than the RL algorithm would see if you just had one state, which is kind of why people think that it's why the performance in this paper was so strong. But I still think that it's surprising that there isn't more RL work of this style happening now. This paper is in 2017. So it's like six years later and I haven't seen things that are exactly similar, but it's a great paper to understand where stuff that's happening now kind of came from.Swyx [00:17:58]: Just on the Christiano paper, you mentioned the performance being strong. I don't remember what results should I have in mind when I think about that paper?Nathan [00:18:04]: It's mostly like if you think about an RL learning curve, which is like on the X axis, you have environment interactions on the Y axis, you have performance. You can think about different like ablation studies of between algorithms. So I think they use like A2C, which I don't even remember what that stands for as their baseline. But if you do the human preference version on a bunch of environments, like the human preference labels, the agent was able to learn faster than if it just learned from the signal from the environment, which means like it's happening because the reward model has more information than the agent would. But like the fact that it can do better, I was like, that's pretty surprising to me because RL algorithms are pretty sensitive. So I was like, okay.Swyx [00:18:41]: It's just one thing I do want to establish as a baseline for our listeners. We are updating all the weights. In some sense, the next token prediction task of training a language model is a form of reinforcement learning. Except that it's not from human feedback. It's just self-supervised learning from a general corpus. There's one distinction which I love, which is that you can actually give negative feedback. Whereas in a general sort of pre-training situation, you cannot. And maybe like the order of magnitude of feedback, like the Likert scale that you're going to talk about, that actually just gives more signal than a typical training process would do in a language model setting. Yeah.Nathan [00:19:15]: I don't think I'm the right person to comment exactly, but like you can make analogies that reinforcement learning is self-supervised learning as well. Like there are a lot of things that will point to that. I don't know whether or not it's a richer signal. I think that could be seen in the results. It's a good thing for people to look into more. As reinforcement learning is so much less compute, like it is a richer signal in terms of its impact. Because if they could do what RLHF is doing at pre-training, they would, but they don't know how to have that effect in like a stable manner. Otherwise everyone would do it.Swyx [00:19:45]: On a practical basis, as someone fine-tuning models, I have often wished for negative fine-tuning, which pretty much doesn't exist in OpenAI land. And it's not the default setup in open-source land.Nathan [00:19:57]: How does this work in like diffusion models and stuff? Because you can give negative prompts to something to like stable diffusion or whatever. It's for guidance.Swyx [00:20:04]: That's for clip guidance.Nathan [00:20:05]: Is that just from like how they prompt it then? I'm just wondering if we could do something similar. It's another tangent.Swyx [00:20:10]: I do want to sort of spell that out for people in case they haven't made the connection between RLHF and the rest of the training process. They might have some familiarity with it.Nathan [00:20:19]: Yeah. The upcoming slides can really dig into this, which is like this in 2018 paper, there was a position paper from a bunch of the same authors from the Christiano paper and from the OpenAI work that everyone knows, which is like, they write a position paper on what a preference reward model could do to solve alignment for agents. That's kind of based on two assumptions. The first assumption is that we can learn user intentions to a sufficiently high accuracy. That doesn't last with me because I don't know what that means. But the second one is pretty telling in the context of RLHF, which is for many tasks we want to solve, evaluation of outcomes is easier than producing the correct behavior. And this is the whole thing. It's like we can compare two poems that the model generates and it can be viewed as liking a positive example, or it could be viewed as really disliking a negative example. And that's what I think a lot of people are doing in like the harm space is like a harmful response to a language model, whether or not you agree with the company's definition of harms is that it's a really bad negative example and they downweight them by preferring something more benign in the RLHF process, among other ways of dealing with safety. So that's a good way of saying it's like this is core, this kind of like comparison and positive or negative example is core to all of the RLHF work that has continued.Swyx [00:21:29]: People often say, I don't know what I want, but I'll know when I see it. This is that expressed in reinforcement learning tools.Nathan [00:21:35]: Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. That's what everyone's doing in the preference modeling stage that we'll get to. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see there are more papers. This is really just to have all the links for people that go deeper. There's a Ziegler et al. paper in 2019, which shows that you can do this RLHF process on language models. This familiar diagram starts to emerge in 2019, and it's just to show that this goes really far back. I think we can kind of breeze through some of these. And then 2020 is the first open AI experiment that I think caught people's eyes, which is this learning to summarize experiment. It has this three-step process that we'll go to into more when I kind of go into the main concepts. But this is like the first time you see this diagram that they reuse with InstructGPT, they reuse with ChatGPT. And the types of examples that they would have, I don't think I need to read these exactly, but one that I have read a whole bunch of times is like, they took these prompts from Reddit that was like, explain like I'm five or get career advice, and people really pour their heart and soul into these. So these are like multi-paragraph pieces of writing. And then they essentially do comparisons between a vanilla language model, like I think it was either GPT-2 or GPT-3, I don't always get the exact years.Swyx [00:22:42]: 3 was early 2020. So that's about right.Nathan [00:22:45]: Yeah. So this is probably done with GPT-2. It doesn't really matter. But the language model does normal things when you do few shot, which is like it repeats itself. It doesn't have nice text. And what they did is that this was the first time where the language model would generate like pretty nice text from an output. It was restricted to the summarization domain. But I think that I guess this is where I wish I was paying attention more because I would see the paper, but I didn't know to read the language model outputs and kind of understand this qualitative sense of the models very well then. Because you look at the plots in the papers, these Learning to Summarize and Destruct GPT have incredibly pretty plots, just like nicely separated lines with error bars and they're like superfine tuning works, the RL step works. But if you were early to see like how different the language that was written by these models was, I think you could have been early to like things like ChatGPT and knowing RLHF would matter. And now I think the good people know to chat with language models, but not even everyone does this. Like people are still looking at numbers. And I think OpenAI probably figured it out when they were doing this, how important that could be. And then they had years to kind of chisel away at that and that's why they're doing so well now. Yeah.Swyx [00:23:56]: I mean, arguably, you know, it's well known that ChatGPT was kind of an accident that they didn't think it would be that big of a deal. Yeah.Nathan [00:24:02]: So maybe they didn't. Maybe they didn't, but they were getting the proxy that they needed.Swyx [00:24:06]: I've heard off the record from other labs that it was in the air. If OpenAI didn't do it, someone else would have done it. So you've mentioned a couple of other papers that are very seminal to this period. And I love how you say way back when in referring to 2019.Nathan [00:24:19]: It feels like it in my life.Swyx [00:24:21]: So how much should people understand the relationship between RLHF, instruction tuning, PPO, KL divergence, anything like that? Like how would you construct the level of knowledge that people should dive into? What should people know at the high level? And then if people want to dive in deeper, where do they go? Is instruct tuning important here or is that part of the overall process towards modern RLHF?Nathan [00:24:44]: I think for most people, instruction tuning is probably still more important in their day to day life. I think instruction tuning works very well. You can write samples by hand that make sense. You can get the model to learn from them. You could do this with very low compute. It's easy to do almost in like no code solutions at this point. And the loss function is really straightforward. And then if you're interested in RLHF, you can kind of learn from it from a different perspective, which is like how the instruction tuning distribution makes it easier for your RLHF model to learn. There's a lot of details depending on your preference data, if it's close to your instruction model or not, if that matters. But that's really at the RLHF stage. So I think it's nice to segment and just kind of understand what your level of investment and goals are. I think instruction tuning still can do most of what you want to do. And it's like, if you want to think about RLHF, at least before DPO really had taken off at all, it would be like, do you want to have a team of at least like five people if you're really thinking about doing RLHF? I think DPO makes it a little bit easier, but that's still really limited to kind of one data set that everyone's using at this point. Like everyone's using this ultra feedback data set and it boosts AlpacaVal, MTBench, TruthfulQA and like the qualitative model a bit. We don't really know why. It's like, it might just be a data set combined with the method, but you've got to be ready for a bumpy ride if you're wanting to try to do RLHF. I don't really recommend most startups to do it unless it's like going to provide them a clear competitive advantage in their kind of niche, because you're not going to make your model chat GPT like better than OpenAI or anything like that. You've got to accept that there's some exploration there and you might get a vein of benefit in your specific domain, but I'm still like, oh, be careful going into the RLHF can of worms. You probably don't need to.Swyx [00:26:27]: Okay. So there's a bit of a time skip in what you mentioned. DPO is like a couple months old, so we'll leave that towards the end. I think the main result that I think most people talk about at this stage, we're talking about September 2020 and then going into, I guess maybe last year was Vicuña as one of the more interesting applications of instruction tuning that pushed LLAMA1 from, let's say a GPT 3-ish model to a GPT 3.5 model in pure open source with not a lot of resources. I think, I mean, they said something like, you know, they use like under $100 to makeNathan [00:26:58]: this. Yeah. Like instruction tuning can really go a long way. I think the claims of chat GPT level are long overblown in most of the things in open source. I think it's not to say, like Vicuña was a huge step and it's just kind of showing that instruction tuning with the right data will completely change what it feels like to talk with your model. Yeah.Swyx [00:27:19]: From text completion to actually chatting back and forth. Yeah. Yeah.Nathan [00:27:23]: Instruction tuning can be multi-turn. Just having a little bit of data that's like a couple of turns can go a really long way. That was like the story of the whole first part of the year is like people would be surprised by how far you can take instruction tuning on a small model. I think the things that people see now is like the small models don't really handle nuance as well and they could be more repetitive even if they have really good instruction tuning. But if you take that kind of 7 to 70 billion parameter jump, like the instruction tuning at the bigger model is like robustness, little things make more sense. So that's still just with instruction tuning and scale more than anything else.Swyx [00:27:56]: Excellent. Shall we go to technical overview?Nathan [00:27:58]: Yeah. This is kind of where we go through my own version of this like three phase process. You can talk about instruction tuning, which we've talked about a lot. It's funny because all these things, instruction tuning has the fewest slides, even though it's the most practical thing for most people. We could save the debate for like if the big labs still do instruction tuning for later, but that's a coming wave for people. And then like preference data and training and then kind of like what does reinforce learning optimization actually mean? We talk about these sequentially because you really have to be able to do each of them to be able to do the next one. You need to be able to have a model that's chatty or helpful instruction following. Every company has their own word that they like to assign to what instructions mean. And then once you have that, you can collect preference data and do some sort of optimization.Swyx [00:28:39]: When you say word, you mean like angle bracket inst or do you mean something else?Nathan [00:28:42]: Oh, I don't even know what inst means, but just saying like they use their adjective that they like. I think Entropic also like steerable is another one.Swyx [00:28:51]: Just the way they describe it. Yeah.Nathan [00:28:53]: So like instruction tuning, we've covered most of this is really about like you should try to adapt your models to specific needs. It makes models that were only okay, extremely comprehensible. A lot of the times it's where you start to get things like chat templates. So if you want to do system prompts, if you want to ask your model, like act like a pirate, that's one of the ones I always do, which is always funny, but like whatever you like act like a chef, like anything, this is where those types of things that people really know in language models start to get applied. So it's good as a kind of starting point because this chat template is used in our early childhood and all of these things down the line, but it was a basic pointer. It's like, once you see this with instruction tuning, you really know it, which is like you take things like stack overflow where you have a question and an answer. You format that data really nicely. There's much more tricky things that people do, but I still think the vast majority of it is question answer. Please explain this topic to me, generate this thing for me. That hasn't changed that much this year. I think people have just gotten better at scaling up the data that they need. Yeah, this is where this talk will kind of take a whole left turn into more technical detail land. I put a slide with the RLHF objective, which I think is good for people to know. I've started going back to this more, just kind of understand what is trying to happen here and what type of math people could do. I think because of this algorithm, we've mentioned this, it's in the air, direct preference optimization, but everything kind of comes from an equation of trying to learn a policy that maximizes the reward. The reward is some learned metric. A lot can be said about what the reward should be subject to some constraint. The most popular constraint is the KL distraint, which is just a distributional distance. Essentially in language models, that means if you have a completion from your instruction or RLHF model, you can compare that completion to a base model. And looking at the log probs from the model, which are essentially how likely each token is, you can see a rough calculation of the distance between these two models, just as a scalar number. I think what that actually looks like in code, you can look at it. It'd be like a sum of log probs that you get right from the model. It'll look much more simpler than it sounds, but it is just to make the optimization kind of stay on tracks.Make sure it doesn't overfit to the RLHF data. Because we have so little data in RLHF, overfitting is really something that could happen. I think it'll fit to specific features that labelers like to see, that the model likes to generate, punctuation, weird tokens like calculator tokens. It could overfit to anything if it's in the data a lot and it happens to be in a specific format. And the KL constraint prevents that. There's not that much documented work on that, but there's a lot of people that know if you take that away, it just doesn't work at all. I think it's something that people don't focus on too much. But the objective, as I said, it's just kind of, you optimize the reward. The reward is where the human part of this comes in. We'll talk about that next. And then subject to a constraint, don't change the model too much. The real questions are, how do you implement the reward? And then how do you make the reward go up in a meaningful way? So like a preference model, the task is kind of to design a human reward. I think the equation that most of the stuff is based on right now is something called a Bradley-Terry model, which is like a pairwise preference model where you compare two completions and you say which one you like better. I'll show an interface that Anthropic uses here. And the Bradley-Terry model is really a fancy probability between two selections. And what's happening in the math is that you're looking at the probability that the chosen completion, the one you like better, is actually the better completion over the rejected completion. And what these preference models do is they assume this probability is correlated to reward. So if you just sample from this probability, it'll give you a scalar. And then you use that reward later on to signify what piece of text is better. I'm kind of inclined to breeze through the math stuff because otherwise, it's going to be not as good to listen to.Alessio [00:32:49]: I think people want to hear it. I think there's a lot of higher level explanations out there. Yeah.Nathan [00:32:55]: So the real thing is you need to assign a scalar reward of how good a response is. And that's not necessarily that easy to understand. Because if we take back to one of the first works, I mentioned this tamer thing for decision making. People tried that with language models, which is if you have a prompt in a completion and you just have someone rate it from 0 to 10, could you then train a reward model on all of these completions in 0 to 10 ratings and see if you can get chat2BT with that? And the answer is really kind of no. Like a lot of people tried that. It didn't really work. And then that's why they tried this pairwise preference thing. And it happened to work. And this Bradley Terry model comes from the 50s. It's from these fields that I was mentioning earlier. And it's wild how much this happens. I mean, this screenshot I have in the slides is from the DPO paper. I think it might be the appendix. But it's still really around in the literature of what people are doing for RLHF.Alessio [00:33:45]: Yeah.Nathan [00:33:45]: So it's a fun one to know.Swyx [00:33:46]: I'll point out one presumption that this heavily relies on. You mentioned this as part of your six presumptions that we covered earlier, which is that you can aggregate these preferences. This is not exactly true among all humans, right? I have a preference for one thing. You have a preference for a different thing. And actually coming from economics, you mentioned economics earlier. There's a theorem or a name for this called error impossibility, which I'm sure you've come across..Nathan [00:34:07]: It's one of the many kind of things we throw around in the paper.Swyx [00:34:10]: Right. Do we just ignore it?Nathan [00:34:14]: We just, yeah, just aggregate. Yeah. I think the reason this really is done on a deep level is that you're not actually trying to model any contestable preference in this. You're not trying to go into things that are controversial or anything. It's really the notion of preference is trying to stay around correctness and style rather than any meaningful notion of preference. Because otherwise these companies, they don't want to do this at all. I think that's just how it is. And it's like, if you look at what people actually do. So I have a bunch of slides on the feedback interface. And they all publish this.Swyx [00:34:43]: It's always at the appendices of every paper.Nathan [00:34:47]: There's something later on in this talk, which is like, but it's good to mention. And this is when you're doing this preference collection, you write out a very long document of instructions to people that are collecting this data. And it's like, this is the hierarchy of what we want to prioritize. Something amount like factuality, helpfulness, honestness, harmlessness. These are all different things. Every company will rank these in different ways, provide extensive examples. It's like, if you see these two answers, you should select this one and why. And all of this stuff. And then my kind of like head scratching is like, why don't we check if the models actually do these things that we tell the data annotators to collect? But I think it's because it's hard to make that attribution. And it's hard to test if a model is honest and stuff. It would just be nice to understand the kind of causal mechanisms as a researcher or like if our goals are met. But at a simple level, what it boils down to, I have a lot more images than I need. It's like you're having a conversation with an AI, something like type GPT. You get shown two responses or more in some papers, and then you have to choose which one is better. I think something you'll hear a lot in this space is something called a Likert scale. Likert is a name. It's a name for probably some research in economics, decision theory, something. But essentially, it's a type of scale where if you have integers from like one to eight, the middle numbers will represent something close to a tie. And the smallest numbers will represent one model being way better than the other. And the biggest numbers will be like the other models better. So in the case of one to eight, if you're comparing models A to B, if you return a one, if you really liked option A, you return eight if you really like B, and then like a four or five if they were close. There's other ways to collect this data. This one's become really popular. We played with it a bit at Hugging Face. It's hard to use. Filling out this preference data is really hard. You have to read like multiple paragraphs. It's not for me. Some people really like it. I hear I'm like, I can't imagine sitting there and reading AI-generated text and like having to do that for my job. But a lot of these early papers in RLHF have good examples of what was done. The one I have here is from Anthropic's collection demo because it was from slides that I did with Anthropic. But you can look up these in the various papers. It looks like Chat2BT with two responses, and then you have an option to say which one is better. It's nothing crazy. The infrastructure is almost exactly the same, but they just log which one you think is better. I think places like Scale are also really big in this where a lot of the labeler companies will help control like who's doing how many samples. You have multiple people go over the same sample once and like what happens if there's disagreement. I don't really think this disagreement data is used for anything, but it's good to know like what the distribution of prompts is, who's doing it, how many samples you have, controlling the workforce. All of this is very hard. A last thing to add is that a lot of these companies do collect optional metadata. I think the Anthropic example shows a rating of like how good was the prompt or the conversation from good to bad because things matter. Like there's kind of a quadrant of preference data in my mind, which is you're comparing a good answer to a good answer, which is like really interesting signal. And then there's kind of the option of you're comparing a bad answer to a bad answer, which is like you don't want to train your model on two different issues. This is like, we did this at Hugging Base and it was like, our data was like, we don't know if we can use this because a lot of it was just bad answer to bad answer because you're like rushing to try to do this real contract. And then there's also good answer to bad answer, which I think is probably pretty reasonable to include. You just prefer the good one and move on with your life. But those are very different scenarios. I think open AIs of the world are all in good answer, good answer, and have learned to eliminate everything else. But when people try to do this in open source, it's probably like what Open Assistance saw is like, there's just a lot of bad answers in your preference data. And you're like, what do I do with this? Metadata flags can help. I threw in the instruct GPT metadata. You can see how much they collect here. And like everything from the model fails to actually complete the task, hallucinations, different types of offensive or dangerous content, moral judgment, expresses opinion. Like, I don't know exactly if they're doing this now, but you can kind of see why doing RLHF at scale and prioritizing a lot of different endpoints would be hard because these are all things I'd be interested in if I was scaling up a big team to do RLHF and like what is going into the preference data. You do an experiment and you're like, okay, we're going to remove all the data where they said the model hallucinates like just that and then retrain everything. Like, what does that do?Swyx [00:38:59]: Yeah, so hallucination is big, but some of these other metadata categories, and I've seen this in a lot of papers, it's like, does it contain sexual content? Does it express a moral judgment? Does it denigrate a protected class? That kind of stuff, very binary. Should people try to adjust for this at the RLHF layer or should they put it as a pipeline where they have a classifier as a separate model that grades the model output?Nathan [00:39:20]: Do you mean for training or like a deployment? Deployment. I do think that people are doing it at deployment. I think we've seen safety and other things in the RLHF pipeline. Like Lama 2 is famous for kind of having this like helpfulness and safety reward models. Deep in the Gemini report is something that Gemini has like four things, which is like helpfulness, factuality, maybe safety, maybe something else. But places like Anthropic and Chattopadhyay and Bard almost surely have a classifier after, which is like, is this text good? Is this text bad? That's not that surprising, I think, because you could use like a hundred times smaller language model and do much better at filtering than RLHF. But I do think it's still so deeply intertwined with the motivation of RLHF to be for safety that some of these categories still persist. I think that's something I'll kind of settle out, I think.Swyx [00:40:11]: I'm just wondering if it's worth collecting this data for the RLHF purpose, if you're not going to use it in any way, separate model to-Nathan [00:40:18]: Yeah, I don't think OpenAI will collect all of this anymore, but I think for research perspectives, it's very insightful to know, but it's also expensive. So essentially your preference data scales with how many minutes it takes for you to do each task and every button is like, it scales pretty linearly. So it's not cheap stuff.Swyx [00:40:35]: Can we, since you mentioned expensiveness, I think you may have joined one of our spaces back in Lama 2 was released. We had an estimate from you that was something on the order of Lama 2 costs $3 to $6 million to train GPU-wise, and then it was something like $20 to $30 million in preference data. Is that something that's still in the ballpark? I don't need precise numbers.Nathan [00:40:56]: I think it's still a ballpark. I know that the 20 million was off by a factor of four because I was converting from a prompt number to a total data point. So essentially when you do this, if you have multi-turn setting, each turn will be one data point and the Lama 2 paper reports like 1.5 million data points, which could be like 400,000 prompts. So I would say it's still say like 6 to 8 million is safe to say that they're spending, if not more, they're probably also buying other types of data and or throwing out data that they don't like, but it's very comparable to compute costs. But the compute costs listed in the paper always are way lower because all they have to say is like, what does one run cost? But they're running tens or hundreds of runs. So it's like, okay, like... Yeah, it's just kind of a meaningless number. Yeah, the data number would be more interesting.Alessio [00:41:42]: What's the depreciation of this data?Nathan [00:41:46]: It depends on the method. Like some methods, people think that it's more sensitive to the, this is what I was saying. It was like, does the type of instruction tuning you do matter for RLHF? So like, depending on the method, some people are trying to figure out if you need to have like what is called like, this is very confusing. It's called like on policy data, which is like your RLHF data is from your instruction model. I really think people in open source and academics are going to figure out how to use any preference data on any model just because they're scrappy. But there's been an intuition that to do like PPO well and keep improving the model over time and do like what Meta did and what people think that OpenAI does is that you need to collect new preference data to kind of edge the distribution of capabilities forward. So there's a depreciation where like the first batch of data you collect isn't really useful for training the model when you have the fifth batch. We don't really know, but it's a good question. And I do think that if we had all the LLAMA data, we wouldn't know what to do with all of it. Like probably like 20 to 40% would be pretty useful for people, but not the whole data set. Like a lot of it's probably kind of gibberish because they had a lot of data in there.Alessio [00:42:51]: So do you think like the open source community should spend more time figuring out how to reuse the data that we have or like generate more data? I think that's one of the-Nathan [00:43:02]: I think if the people are kind of locked into using synthetic data, people also think that synthetic data is like GPT-4 is more accurate than humans at labeling preferences. So if you look at these diagrams, like humans are about 60 to 70% agreement. And we're like, that's what the models get to. And if humans are about 70% agreement or accuracy, like GPT-4 is like 80%. So it is a bit better, which is like in one way of saying it.Swyx [00:43:24]: Humans don't even agree with humans 50% of the time.Nathan [00:43:27]: Yeah, so like that's the thing. It's like the human disagreement or the lack of accuracy should be like a signal, but how do you incorporate that? It's really tricky to actually do that. I think that people just keep using GPT-4 because it's really cheap. It's one of my like go-to, like I just say this over and over again is like GPT-4 for data generation, all terms and conditions aside because we know OpenAI has this stuff is like very cheap for getting pretty good data compared to compute or salary of any engineer or anything. So it's like tell people to go crazy generating GPT-4 data if you're willing to take the organizational like cloud of should we be doing this? But I think most people have accepted that you kind of do this, especially at individuals. Like they're not gonna come after individuals. I do think more companies should think twice before doing tons of OpenAI outputs. Also just because the data contamination and what it does to your workflow is probably hard to control at scale.Swyx [00:44:21]: And we should just mention at the time of recording, we've seen the first example of OpenAI enforcing their terms of service. ByteDance was caught, reported to be training on GPT-4 data and they got their access to OpenAI revoked. So that was one example.Nathan [00:44:36]: Yeah, I don't expect OpenAI to go too crazy on this cause they're just gonna, there's gonna be so much backlash against them. And like, everyone's gonna do it anyways.Swyx [00:44:46]: And what's at stake here to spell it out is like, okay, that's like cost $10 to collect one data point from a human. It's gonna cost you like a 10th of a cent with OpenAI, right? So like it's just orders of magnitude cheaper. And therefore people-Nathan [00:44:58]: Yeah, and it's like the signal you get from humans is from preferences isn't that high. The signal that you get from humans for instructions is pretty high, but it is also very expensive. So like the human instructions are definitely like by far and away the best ones out there compared to the synthetic data. But I think like the synthetic preferences are just so much easier to get some sort of signal running with and you can work in other, I think people will start working in other goals there between safety and whatever. That's something that's taking off and we'll kind of see that. I think in 2024, at some point, people will start doing things like constitutional AI for preferences, which will be pretty interesting. I think we saw how long it took RLHF to get started in open source. Instruction tuning was like the only thing that was really happening until maybe like August, really. I think Zephyr was the first model that showed success with RLHF in the public, but that's a long time from everyone knowing that it was something that people are interested in to having any like check mark. So I accept that and think the same will happen with constitutional AI. But once people show that you can do it once, they continue to explore.Alessio [00:46:01]: Excellent.Swyx [00:46:01]: Just in the domain of human preference data suppliers, Scale.ai very happily will tell you that they supplied all that data for Lama 2. The other one is probably interesting, LMSYS from Berkeley. What they're running with Chaterina is perhaps a good store of human preference data.Nathan [00:46:17]: Yeah, they released some toxicity data. They, I think, are generally worried about releasing data because they have to process it and make sure everything is safe and they're really lightweight work. I think they're trying to release the preference data. I have, if we make it to evaluation, I'd pretty much say that Chaterina is the best limited evaluation that people have to learn how to use language models. And like, it's very valuable data. They also may share some data with people that they host models from. So like if your model is hosted there and you pay for the hosting, you can get the prompts because you're pointing the endpoint at it and that gets pinged to you and you're any real LLM inference stack saves the prompts tha

In episode 6 of our first season on AI, we heard from Kyunghyun Cho, a professor of computer science and data science at New York University, about how artificial intelligence research in academia so often resembles corporate product development. But in his initial talk with host Raffi Krikorian, Kyunghyun had a lot of other interesting things to say — for instance, about how AI models affect marginalized languages, on whether generative AI could produce something of cultural significance, and about the connection between AI “hallucinations” and creativity. Here's Kyunghyun's blog post on AI and compression (which references this piece in the New Yorker by Ted Chiang); and here's more info on the “AI and Marginalized Languages” panel at the 2023 ICML. To learn more about Technically Optimistic and to read the transcript for this episode: emersoncollective.com/technically-optimistic-podcast For more on Emerson Collective: emersoncollective.com Learn more about our host, Raffi Krikorian: emersoncollective.com/persons/raffi-krikorian Technically Optimistic is produced by Emerson Collective with music by Mattie Safer. Email us with questions and feedback at technicallyoptimistic@emersoncollective.com. Subscribe to Emerson Collective's newsletter: emersoncollective.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

MLOps Coffee Sessions #173 with Lingjiao Chen, FrugalGPT: Better Quality and Lower Cost for LLM Applications. This episode is sponsored by QuantumBlack. We are now accepting talk proposals for our next LLM in Production virtual conference on October 3rd. Apply to speak here: https://go.mlops.community/NSAX1O // Abstract There is a rapidly growing number of large language models (LLMs) that users can query for a fee. We review the cost associated with querying popular LLM APIs, e.g. GPT-4, ChatGPT, J1-Jumbo, and find that these models have heterogeneous pricing structures, with fees that can differ by two orders of magnitude. In particular, using LLMs on large collections of queries and text can be expensive. Motivated by this, we outline and discuss three types of strategies that users can exploit to reduce the inference cost associated with using LLMs: 1) prompt adaptation, 2) LLM approximation, and 3) LLM cascade. As an example, we propose FrugalGPT, a simple yet flexible instantiation of LLM cascade which learns which combinations of LLMs to use for different queries in order to reduce cost and improve accuracy. Our experiments show that FrugalGPT can match the performance of the best individual LLM (e.g. GPT-4) with up to 98% cost reduction or improve the accuracy over GPT-4 by 4% with the same cost. The ideas and findings presented here lay a foundation for using LLMs sustainably and efficiently. // Bio Lingjiao Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the computer sciences department at Stanford University. He is broadly interested in machine learning, data management, and optimization. Working with Matei Zaharia and James Zou, he is currently exploring the fast-growing marketplaces of artificial intelligence and data. His work has been published at premier conferences and journals such as ICML, NeurIPS, SIGMOD, and PVLDB, and partially supported by a Google fellowship. // MLOps Jobs board https://mlops.pallet.xyz/jobs // MLOps Swag/Merch https://mlops-community.myshopify.com/ // Related Links ⁠Website: https://lchen001.github.io/ FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05176 --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Lingjiao on LinkedIn:

Today we're joined by Gokul Swamy, a Ph.D. Student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In the final conversation of our ICML 2023 series, we sat down with Gokul to discuss his accepted papers at the event, leading off with “Inverse Reinforcement Learning without Reinforcement Learning.” In this paper, Gokul explores the challenges and benefits of inverse reinforcement learning, and the potential and advantages it holds for various applications. Next up, we explore the “Complementing a Policy with a Different Observation Space” paper which applies causal inference techniques to accurately estimate sampling balance and make decisions based on limited observed features. Finally, we touched on “Learning Shared Safety Constraints from Multi-task Demonstrations” which centers on learning safety constraints from demonstrations using the inverse reinforcement learning approach. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/643.

In this episode, Catherine C. Coombs, MD, and Toby Eyre, MBChB, MD, discuss key trials presented at ICML 2023 evaluating the use of BTK inhibitors in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). The discussion includes analyses of: Phase II trial of acalabrutinib with rituximab for older patients with untreated MCL BRUIN: updated results of pirtobrutinib in covalent BTK inhibitor–pretreated MCL IMCL-2015 GELTAMO: 5-year update ibrutinib for untreated indolent MCL Presenters: Catherine C. Coombs, MD, MSAssociate Clinical ProfessorDivision of Hematology/Oncology, Department of MedicineUCI HealthOrange, CaliforniaToby Eyre, MBChB, MDHonorary Senior LecturerHematology and CancerUniversity of OxfordConsultant HematologistDepartment of HematologyHematology and Cancer Centre, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation TrustOxford, United Kingdom

Today we're joined by Su-In Lee, a professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science And Engineering at the University Of Washington. In our conversation, Su-In details her talk from the ICML 2023 Workshop on Computational Biology which focuses on developing explainable AI techniques for the computational biology and clinical medicine fields. Su-In discussed the importance of explainable AI contributing to feature collaboration, the robustness of different explainability approaches, and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between the computer science, biology, and medical fields. We also explore her recent paper on the use of drug combination therapy, challenges with handling biomedical data, and how they aim to make meaningful contributions to the healthcare industry by aiding in cause identification and treatments for Cancer and Alzheimer's diseases. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/642.

Erik is a Phd at Berkeley working with Jacob Steinhardt, interested in making generative machine learning systems more robust, reliable, and aligned, with a focus on large language models.In this interview we talk about his paper "Automatically Auditing Large Language Models via Discrete Optimization" that he presented at ICML. Youtube: https://youtu.be/bhE5Zs3Y1n8 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04381 Erik: https://twitter.com/ErikJones313 Host: https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theinsideview Outline 00:00 Highlights 00:31 Eric's background and research in Berkeley 01:19 Motivation for doing safety research on language models 02:56 Is it too easy to fool today's language models? 03:31 The goal of adversarial attacks on language models 04:57 Automatically Auditing Large Language Models via Discrete Optimization 06:01 Optimizing over a finite set of tokens rather than continuous embeddings 06:44 Goal is revealing behaviors, not necessarily breaking the AI 07:51 On the feasibility of solving adversarial attacks 09:18 Suppressing dangerous knowledge vs just bypassing safety filters 10:35 Can you really ask a language model to cook meth? 11:48 Optimizing French to English translation example 13:07 Forcing toxic celebrity outputs just to test rare behaviors 13:19 Testing the method on GPT-2 and GPT-J 14:03 Adversarial prompts transferred to GPT-3 as well 14:39 How this auditing research fits into the broader AI safety field 15:49 Need for automated tools to audit failures beyond what humans can find 17:47 Auditing to avoid unsafe deployments, not for existential risk reduction 18:41 Adaptive auditing that updates based on the model's outputs 19:54 Prospects for using these methods to detect model deception 22:26 Prefer safety via alignment over just auditing constraints, Closing thoughts Patreon supporters: Tassilo Neubauer MonikerEpsilon Alexey Malafeev Jack Seroy JJ Hepburn Max Chiswick William Freire Edward Huff Gunnar Höglund Ryan Coppolo Cameron Holmes Emil Wallner Jesse Hoogland Jacques Thibodeau Vincent Weisser

We have just announced our first set of speakers at AI Engineer Summit! Sign up for the livestream or email sponsors@ai.engineer if you'd like to support.We are facing a massive GPU crunch. As both startups and VC's hoard Nvidia GPUs like countries count nuclear stockpiles, tweets about GPU shortages have become increasingly common. But what if we could run LLMs with AMD cards, or without a GPU at all? There's just one weird trick: compilation. And there's one person uniquely qualified to do it.We had the pleasure to sit down with Tianqi Chen, who's an Assistant Professor at CMU, where he both teaches the MLC course and runs the MLC group. You might also know him as the creator of XGBoost, Apache TVM, and MXNet, as well as the co-founder of OctoML. The MLC (short for Machine Learning Compilation) group has released a lot of interesting projects:* MLC Chat: an iPhone app that lets you run models like RedPajama-3B and Vicuna-7B on-device. It gets up to 30 tok/s!* Web LLM: Run models like LLaMA-70B in your browser (!!) to offer local inference in your product.* MLC LLM: a framework that allows any language models to be deployed natively on different hardware and software stacks.The MLC group has just announced new support for AMD cards; we previously talked about the shortcomings of ROCm, but using MLC you can get performance very close to the NVIDIA's counterparts. This is great news for founders and builders, as AMD cards are more readily available. Here are their latest results on AMD's 7900s vs some of top NVIDIA consumer cards.If you just can't get a GPU at all, MLC LLM also supports ARM and x86 CPU architectures as targets by leveraging LLVM. While speed performance isn't comparable, it allows for non-time-sensitive inference to be run on commodity hardware.We also enjoyed getting a peek into TQ's process, which involves a lot of sketching:With all the other work going on in this space with projects like ggml and Ollama, we're excited to see GPUs becoming less and less of an issue to get models in the hands of more people, and innovative software solutions to hardware problems!Show Notes* TQ's Projects:* XGBoost* Apache TVM* MXNet* MLC* OctoML* CMU Catalyst* ONNX* GGML* Mojo* WebLLM* RWKV* HiPPO* Tri Dao's Episode* George Hotz EpisodePeople:* Carlos Guestrin* Albert GuTimestamps* [00:00:00] Intros* [00:03:41] The creation of XGBoost and its surprising popularity* [00:06:01] Comparing tree-based models vs deep learning* [00:10:33] Overview of TVM and how it works with ONNX* [00:17:18] MLC deep dive* [00:28:10] Using int4 quantization for inference of language models* [00:30:32] Comparison of MLC to other model optimization projects* [00:35:02] Running large language models in the browser with WebLLM* [00:37:47] Integrating browser models into applications* [00:41:15] OctoAI and self-optimizing compute* [00:45:45] Lightning RoundTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space. [00:00:20]Swyx: Okay, and we are here with Tianqi Chen, or TQ as people call him, who is assistant professor in ML computer science at CMU, Carnegie Mellon University, also helping to run Catalyst Group, also chief technologist of OctoML. You wear many hats. Are those, you know, your primary identities these days? Of course, of course. [00:00:42]Tianqi: I'm also, you know, very enthusiastic open source. So I'm also a VP and PRC member of the Apache TVM project and so on. But yeah, these are the things I've been up to so far. [00:00:53]Swyx: Yeah. So you did Apache TVM, XGBoost, and MXNet, and we can cover any of those in any amount of detail. But maybe what's one thing about you that people might not learn from your official bio or LinkedIn, you know, on the personal side? [00:01:08]Tianqi: Let me say, yeah, so normally when I do, I really love coding, even though like I'm trying to run all those things. So one thing that I keep a habit on is I try to do sketchbooks. I have a book, like real sketchbooks to draw down the design diagrams and the sketchbooks I keep sketching over the years, and now I have like three or four of them. And it's kind of a usually a fun experience of thinking the design through and also seeing how open source project evolves and also looking back at the sketches that we had in the past to say, you know, all these ideas really turn into code nowadays. [00:01:43]Alessio: How many sketchbooks did you get through to build all this stuff? I mean, if one person alone built one of those projects, he'll be a very accomplished engineer. Like you built like three of these. What's that process like for you? Like it's the sketchbook, like the start, and then you think about the code or like. [00:01:59]Swyx: Yeah. [00:02:00]Tianqi: So, so usually I start sketching on high level architectures and also in a project that works for over years, we also start to think about, you know, new directions, like of course generative AI language model comes in, how it's going to evolve. So normally I would say it takes like one book a year, roughly at that rate. It's usually fun to, I find it's much easier to sketch things out and then gives a more like a high level architectural guide for some of the future items. Yeah. [00:02:28]Swyx: Have you ever published this sketchbooks? Cause I think people would be very interested on, at least on a historical basis. Like this is the time where XGBoost was born, you know? Yeah, not really. [00:02:37]Tianqi: I started sketching like after XGBoost. So that's a kind of missing piece, but a lot of design details in TVM are actually part of the books that I try to keep a record of. [00:02:48]Swyx: Yeah, we'll try to publish them and publish something in the journals. Maybe you can grab a little snapshot for visual aid. Sounds good. [00:02:57]Alessio: Yeah. And yeah, talking about XGBoost, so a lot of people in the audience might know it's a gradient boosting library, probably the most popular out there. And it became super popular because many people started using them in like a machine learning competitions. And I think there's like a whole Wikipedia page of like all state-of-the-art models. They use XGBoost and like, it's a really long list. When you were working on it, so we just had Tri Dao, who's the creator of FlashAttention on the podcast. And I asked him this question, it's like, when you were building FlashAttention, did you know that like almost any transform race model will use it? And so I asked the same question to you when you were coming up with XGBoost, like, could you predict it would be so popular or like, what was the creation process? And when you published it, what did you expect? We have no idea. [00:03:41]Tianqi: Like, actually, the original reason that we built that library is that at that time, deep learning just came out. Like that was the time where AlexNet just came out. And one of the ambitious mission that myself and my advisor, Carlos Guestrin, then is we want to think about, you know, try to test the hypothesis. Can we find alternatives to deep learning models? Because then, you know, there are other alternatives like, you know, support vector machines, linear models, and of course, tree-based models. And our question was, if you build those models and feed them with big enough data, because usually like one of the key characteristics of deep learning is that it's taking a lot [00:04:22]Swyx: of data, right? [00:04:23]Tianqi: So we will be able to get the same amount of performance. That's a hypothesis we're setting out to test. Of course, if you look at now, right, that's a wrong hypothesis, but as a byproduct, what we find out is that, you know, most of the gradient boosting library out there is not efficient enough for us to test that hypothesis. So I happen to have quite a bit of experience in the past of building gradient boosting trees and their variants. So Effective Action Boost was kind of like a byproduct of that hypothesis testing. At that time, I'm also competing a bit in data science challenges, like I worked on KDDCup and then Kaggle kind of become bigger, right? So I kind of think maybe it's becoming useful to others. One of my friends convinced me to try to do a Python binding of it. That tends to be like a very good decision, right, to be effective. Usually when I build it, we feel like maybe a command line interface is okay. And now we have a Python binding, we have R bindings. And then it realized, you know, it started getting interesting. People started contributing different perspectives, like visualization and so on. So we started to push a bit more on to building distributive support to make sure it works on any platform and so on. And even at that time point, when I talked to Carlos, my advisor, later, he said he never anticipated that we'll get to that level of success. And actually, why I pushed for gradient boosting trees, interestingly, at that time, he also disagreed. He thinks that maybe we should go for kernel machines then. And it turns out, you know, actually, we are both wrong in some sense, and Deep Neural Network was the king in the hill. But at least the gradient boosting direction got into something fruitful. [00:06:01]Swyx: Interesting. [00:06:02]Alessio: I'm always curious when it comes to these improvements, like, what's the design process in terms of like coming up with it? And how much of it is a collaborative with like other people that you're working with versus like trying to be, you know, obviously, in academia, it's like very paper-driven kind of research driven. [00:06:19]Tianqi: I would say the extra boost improvement at that time point was more on like, you know, I'm trying to figure out, right. But it's combining lessons. Before that, I did work on some of the other libraries on matrix factorization. That was like my first open source experience. Nobody knew about it, because you'll find, likely, if you go and try to search for the package SVD feature, you'll find some SVN repo somewhere. But it's actually being used for some of the recommender system packages. So I'm trying to apply some of the previous lessons there and trying to combine them. The later projects like MXNet and then TVM is much, much more collaborative in a sense that... But, of course, extra boost has become bigger, right? So when we started that project myself, and then we have, it's really amazing to see people come in. Michael, who was a lawyer, and now he works on the AI space as well, on contributing visualizations. Now we have people from our community contributing different things. So extra boost even today, right, it's a community of committers driving the project. So it's definitely something collaborative and moving forward on getting some of the things continuously improved for our community. [00:07:37]Alessio: Let's talk a bit about TVM too, because we got a lot of things to run through in this episode. [00:07:42]Swyx: I would say that at some point, I'd love to talk about this comparison between extra boost or tree-based type AI or machine learning compared to deep learning, because I think there is a lot of interest around, I guess, merging the two disciplines, right? And we can talk more about that. I don't know where to insert that, by the way, so we can come back to it later. Yeah. [00:08:04]Tianqi: Actually, what I said, when we test the hypothesis, the hypothesis is kind of, I would say it's partially wrong, because the hypothesis we want to test now is, can you run tree-based models on image classification tasks, where deep learning is certainly a no-brainer right [00:08:17]Swyx: now today, right? [00:08:18]Tianqi: But if you try to run it on tabular data, still, you'll find that most people opt for tree-based models. And there's a reason for that, in the sense that when you are looking at tree-based models, the decision boundaries are naturally rules that you're looking at, right? And they also have nice properties, like being able to be agnostic to scale of input and be able to automatically compose features together. And I know there are attempts on building neural network models that work for tabular data, and I also sometimes follow them. I do feel like it's good to have a bit of diversity in the modeling space. Actually, when we're building TVM, we build cost models for the programs, and actually we are using XGBoost for that as well. I still think tree-based models are going to be quite relevant, because first of all, it's really to get it to work out of the box. And also, you will be able to get a bit of interoperability and control monotonicity [00:09:18]Swyx: and so on. [00:09:19]Tianqi: So yes, it's still going to be relevant. I also sometimes keep coming back to think about, are there possible improvements that we can build on top of these models? And definitely, I feel like it's a space that can have some potential in the future. [00:09:34]Swyx: Are there any current projects that you would call out as promising in terms of merging the two directions? [00:09:41]Tianqi: I think there are projects that try to bring a transformer-type model for tabular data. I don't remember specifics of them, but I think even nowadays, if you look at what people are using, tree-based models are still one of their toolkits. So I think maybe eventually it's not even a replacement, it will be just an ensemble of models that you can call. Perfect. [00:10:07]Alessio: Next up, about three years after XGBoost, you built this thing called TVM, which is now a very popular compiler framework for models. Let's talk about, so this came out about at the same time as ONNX. So I think it would be great if you could maybe give a little bit of an overview of how the two things work together. Because it's kind of like the model, then goes to ONNX, then goes to the TVM. But I think a lot of people don't understand the nuances. I can get a bit of a backstory on that. [00:10:33]Tianqi: So actually, that's kind of an ancient history. Before XGBoost, I worked on deep learning for two years or three years. I got a master's before I started my PhD. And during my master's, my thesis focused on applying convolutional restricted Boltzmann machine for ImageNet classification. That is the thing I'm working on. And that was before AlexNet moment. So effectively, I had to handcraft NVIDIA CUDA kernels on, I think, a GTX 2070 card. I have a 22070 card. It took me about six months to get one model working. And eventually, that model is not so good, and we should have picked a better model. But that was like an ancient history that really got me into this deep learning field. And of course, eventually, we find it didn't work out. So in my master's, I ended up working on recommender system, which got me a paper, and I applied and got a PhD. But I always want to come back to work on the deep learning field. So after XGBoost, I think I started to work with some folks on this particular MXNet. At that time, it was like the frameworks of CAFE, Ciano, PyTorch haven't yet come out. And we're really working hard to optimize for performance on GPUs. At that time, I found it's really hard, even for NVIDIA GPU. It took me six months. And then it's amazing to see on different hardwares how hard it is to go and optimize code for the platforms that are interesting. So that gets me thinking, can we build something more generic and automatic? So that I don't need an entire team of so many people to go and build those frameworks. So that's the motivation of starting working on TVM. There is really too little about machine learning engineering needed to support deep learning models on the platforms that we're interested in. I think it started a bit earlier than ONNX, but once it got announced, I think it's in a similar time period at that time. So overall, how it works is that TVM, you will be able to take a subset of machine learning programs that are represented in what we call a computational graph. Nowadays, we can also represent a loop-level program ingest from your machine learning models. Usually, you have model formats ONNX, or in PyTorch, they have FX Tracer that allows you to trace the FX graph. And then it goes through TVM. We also realized that, well, yes, it needs to be more customizable, so it will be able to perform some of the compilation optimizations like fusion operator together, doing smart memory planning, and more importantly, generate low-level code. So that works for NVIDIA and also is portable to other GPU backends, even non-GPU backends [00:13:36]Swyx: out there. [00:13:37]Tianqi: So that's a project that actually has been my primary focus over the past few years. And it's great to see how it started from where I think we are the very early initiator of machine learning compilation. I remember there was a visit one day, one of the students asked me, are you still working on deep learning frameworks? I tell them that I'm working on ML compilation. And they said, okay, compilation, that sounds very ancient. It sounds like a very old field. And why are you working on this? And now it's starting to get more traction, like if you say Torch Compile and other things. I'm really glad to see this field starting to pick up. And also we have to continue innovating here. [00:14:17]Alessio: I think the other thing that I noticed is, it's kind of like a big jump in terms of area of focus to go from XGBoost to TVM, it's kind of like a different part of the stack. Why did you decide to do that? And I think the other thing about compiling to different GPUs and eventually CPUs too, did you already see some of the strain that models could have just being focused on one runtime, only being on CUDA and that, and how much of that went into it? [00:14:50]Tianqi: I think it's less about trying to get impact, more about wanting to have fun. I like to hack code, I had great fun hacking CUDA code. Of course, being able to generate CUDA code is cool, right? But now, after being able to generate CUDA code, okay, by the way, you can do it on other platforms, isn't that amazing? So it's more of that attitude to get me started on this. And also, I think when we look at different researchers, myself is more like a problem solver type. So I like to look at a problem and say, okay, what kind of tools we need to solve that problem? So regardless, it could be building better models. For example, while we build extra boots, we build certain regularizations into it so that it's more robust. It also means building system optimizations, writing low-level code, maybe trying to write assembly and build compilers and so on. So as long as they solve the problem, definitely go and try to do them together. And I also see it's a common trend right now. Like if you want to be able to solve machine learning problems, it's no longer at Aggressor layer, right? You kind of need to solve it from both Aggressor data and systems angle. And this entire field of machine learning system, I think it's kind of emerging. And there's now a conference around it. And it's really good to see a lot more people are starting to look into this. [00:16:10]Swyx: Yeah. Are you talking about ICML or something else? [00:16:13]Tianqi: So machine learning and systems, right? So not only machine learning, but machine learning and system. So there's a conference called MLsys. It's definitely a smaller community than ICML, but I think it's also an emerging and growing community where people are talking about what are the implications of building systems for machine learning, right? And how do you go and optimize things around that and co-design models and systems together? [00:16:37]Swyx: Yeah. And you were area chair for ICML and NeurIPS as well. So you've just had a lot of conference and community organization experience. Is that also an important part of your work? Well, it's kind of expected for academic. [00:16:48]Tianqi: If I hold an academic job, I need to do services for the community. Okay, great. [00:16:53]Swyx: Your most recent venture in MLsys is going to the phone with MLCLLM. You announced this in April. I have it on my phone. It's great. I'm running Lama 2, Vicuña. I don't know what other models that you offer. But maybe just kind of describe your journey into MLC. And I don't know how this coincides with your work at CMU. Is that some kind of outgrowth? [00:17:18]Tianqi: I think it's more like a focused effort that we want in the area of machine learning compilation. So it's kind of related to what we built in TVM. So when we built TVM was five years ago, right? And a lot of things happened. We built the end-to-end machine learning compiler that works, the first one that works. But then we captured a lot of lessons there. So then we are building a second iteration called TVM Unity. That allows us to be able to allow ML engineers to be able to quickly capture the new model and how we demand building optimizations for them. And MLCLLM is kind of like an MLC. It's more like a vertical driven organization that we go and build tutorials and go and build projects like LLM to solutions. So that to really show like, okay, you can take machine learning compilation technology and apply it and bring something fun forward. Yeah. So yes, it runs on phones, which is really cool. But the goal here is not only making it run on phones, right? The goal is making it deploy universally. So we do run on Apple M2 Macs, the 17 billion models. Actually, on a single batch inference, more recently on CUDA, we get, I think, the most best performance you can get out there already on the 4-bit inference. Actually, as I alluded earlier before the podcast, we just had a result on AMD. And on a single batch, actually, we can get the latest AMD GPU. This is a consumer card. It can get to about 80% of the 4019, so NVIDIA's best consumer card out there. So it's not yet on par, but thinking about how diversity and what you can enable and the previous things you can get on that card, it's really amazing that what you can do with this kind of technology. [00:19:10]Swyx: So one thing I'm a little bit confused by is that most of these models are in PyTorch, but you're running this inside a TVM. I don't know. Was there any fundamental change that you needed to do, or was this basically the fundamental design of TVM? [00:19:25]Tianqi: So the idea is that, of course, it comes back to program representation, right? So effectively, TVM has this program representation called TVM script that contains more like computational graph and operational representation. So yes, initially, we do need to take a bit of effort of bringing those models onto the program representation that TVM supports. Usually, there are a mix of ways, depending on the kind of model you're looking at. For example, for vision models and stable diffusion models, usually we can just do tracing that takes PyTorch model onto TVM. That part is still being robustified so that we can bring more models in. On language model tasks, actually what we do is we directly build some of the model constructors and try to directly map from Hugging Face models. The goal is if you have a Hugging Face configuration, we will be able to bring that in and apply optimization on them. So one fun thing about model compilation is that your optimization doesn't happen only as a soft language, right? For example, if you're writing PyTorch code, you just go and try to use a better fused operator at a source code level. Torch compile might help you do a bit of things in there. In most of the model compilations, it not only happens at the beginning stage, but we also apply generic transformations in between, also through a Python API. So you can tweak some of that. So that part of optimization helps a lot of uplifting in getting both performance and also portability on the environment. And another thing that we do have is what we call universal deployment. So if you get the ML program into this TVM script format, where there are functions that takes in tensor and output tensor, we will be able to have a way to compile it. So they will be able to load the function in any of the language runtime that TVM supports. So if you could load it in JavaScript, and that's a JavaScript function that you can take in tensors and output tensors. If you're loading Python, of course, and C++ and Java. So the goal there is really bring the ML model to the language that people care about and be able to run it on a platform they like. [00:21:37]Swyx: It strikes me that I've talked to a lot of compiler people, but you don't have a traditional compiler background. You're inventing your own discipline called machine learning compilation, or MLC. Do you think that this will be a bigger field going forward? [00:21:52]Tianqi: First of all, I do work with people working on compilation as well. So we're also taking inspirations from a lot of early innovations in the field. Like for example, TVM initially, we take a lot of inspirations from Halide, which is just an image processing compiler. And of course, since then, we have evolved quite a bit to focus on the machine learning related compilations. If you look at some of our conference publications, you'll find that machine learning compilation is already kind of a subfield. So if you look at papers in both machine learning venues, the MLC conferences, of course, and also system venues, every year there will be papers around machine learning compilation. And in the compiler conference called CGO, there's a C4ML workshop that also kind of trying to focus on this area. So definitely it's already starting to gain traction and becoming a field. I wouldn't claim that I invented this field, but definitely I helped to work with a lot of folks there. And I try to bring a perspective, of course, trying to learn a lot from the compiler optimizations as well as trying to bring in knowledges in machine learning and systems together. [00:23:07]Alessio: So we had George Hotz on the podcast a few episodes ago, and he had a lot to say about AMD and their software. So when you think about TVM, are you still restricted in a way by the performance of the underlying kernel, so to speak? So if your target is like a CUDA runtime, you still get better performance, no matter like TVM kind of helps you get there, but then that level you don't take care of, right? [00:23:34]Swyx: There are two parts in here, right? [00:23:35]Tianqi: So first of all, there is the lower level runtime, like CUDA runtime. And then actually for NVIDIA, a lot of the mood came from their libraries, like Cutlass, CUDN, right? Those library optimizations. And also for specialized workloads, actually you can specialize them. Because a lot of cases you'll find that if you go and do benchmarks, it's very interesting. Like two years ago, if you try to benchmark ResNet, for example, usually the NVIDIA library [00:24:04]Swyx: gives you the best performance. [00:24:06]Tianqi: It's really hard to beat them. But as soon as you start to change the model to something, maybe a bit of a variation of ResNet, not for the traditional ImageNet detections, but for latent detection and so on, there will be some room for optimization because people sometimes overfit to benchmarks. These are people who go and optimize things, right? So people overfit the benchmarks. So that's the largest barrier, like being able to get a low level kernel libraries, right? In that sense, the goal of TVM is actually we try to have a generic layer to both, of course, leverage libraries when available, but also be able to automatically generate [00:24:45]Swyx: libraries when possible. [00:24:46]Tianqi: So in that sense, we are not restricted by the libraries that they have to offer. That's why we will be able to run Apple M2 or WebGPU where there's no library available because we are kind of like automatically generating libraries. That makes it easier to support less well-supported hardware, right? For example, WebGPU is one example. From a runtime perspective, AMD, I think before their Vulkan driver was not very well supported. Recently, they are getting good. But even before that, we'll be able to support AMD through this GPU graphics backend called Vulkan, which is not as performant, but it gives you a decent portability across those [00:25:29]Swyx: hardware. [00:25:29]Alessio: And I know we got other MLC stuff to talk about, like WebLLM, but I want to wrap up on the optimization that you're doing. So there's kind of four core things, right? Kernel fusion, which we talked a bit about in the flash attention episode and the tiny grab one memory planning and loop optimization. I think those are like pretty, you know, self-explanatory. I think the one that people have the most questions, can you can you quickly explain [00:25:53]Swyx: those? [00:25:54]Tianqi: So there are kind of a different things, right? Kernel fusion means that, you know, if you have an operator like Convolutions or in the case of a transformer like MOP, you have other operators that follow that, right? You don't want to launch two GPU kernels. You want to be able to put them together in a smart way, right? And as a memory planning, it's more about, you know, hey, if you run like Python code, every time when you generate a new array, you are effectively allocating a new piece of memory, right? Of course, PyTorch and other frameworks try to optimize for you. So there is a smart memory allocator behind the scene. But actually, in a lot of cases, it's much better to statically allocate and plan everything ahead of time. And that's where like a compiler can come in. We need to, first of all, actually for language model, it's much harder because dynamic shape. So you need to be able to what we call symbolic shape tracing. So we have like a symbolic variable that tells you like the shape of the first tensor is n by 12. And the shape of the third tensor is also n by 12. Or maybe it's n times 2 by 12. Although you don't know what n is, right? But you will be able to know that relation and be able to use that to reason about like fusion and other decisions. So besides this, I think loop transformation is quite important. And it's actually non-traditional. Originally, if you simply write a code and you want to get a performance, it's very hard. For example, you know, if you write a matrix multiplier, the simplest thing you can do is you do for i, j, k, c, i, j, plus, equal, you know, a, i, k, times b, i, k. But that code is 100 times slower than the best available code that you can get. So we do a lot of transformation, like being able to take the original code, trying to put things into shared memory, and making use of tensor calls, making use of memory copies, and all this. Actually, all these things, we also realize that, you know, we cannot do all of them. So we also make the ML compilation framework as a Python package, so that people will be able to continuously improve that part of engineering in a more transparent way. So we find that's very useful, actually, for us to be able to get good performance very quickly on some of the new models. Like when Lamato came out, we'll be able to go and look at the whole, here's the bottleneck, and we can go and optimize those. [00:28:10]Alessio: And then the fourth one being weight quantization. So everybody wants to know about that. And just to give people an idea of the memory saving, if you're doing FB32, it's like four bytes per parameter. Int8 is like one byte per parameter. So you can really shrink down the memory footprint. What are some of the trade-offs there? How do you figure out what the right target is? And what are the precision trade-offs, too? [00:28:37]Tianqi: Right now, a lot of people also mostly use int4 now for language models. So that really shrinks things down a lot. And more recently, actually, we started to think that, at least in MOC, we don't want to have a strong opinion on what kind of quantization we want to bring, because there are so many researchers in the field. So what we can do is we can allow developers to customize the quantization they want, but we still bring the optimum code for them. So we are working on this item called bring your own quantization. In fact, hopefully MOC will be able to support more quantization formats. And definitely, I think there's an open field that's being explored. Can you bring more sparsities? Can you quantize activations as much as possible, and so on? And it's going to be something that's going to be relevant for quite a while. [00:29:27]Swyx: You mentioned something I wanted to double back on, which is most people use int4 for language models. This is actually not obvious to me. Are you talking about the GGML type people, or even the researchers who are training the models also using int4? [00:29:40]Tianqi: Sorry, so I'm mainly talking about inference, not training, right? So when you're doing training, of course, int4 is harder, right? Maybe you could do some form of mixed type precision for inference. I think int4 is kind of like, in a lot of cases, you will be able to get away with int4. And actually, that does bring a lot of savings in terms of the memory overhead, and so on. [00:30:09]Alessio: Yeah, that's great. Let's talk a bit about maybe the GGML, then there's Mojo. How should people think about MLC? How do all these things play together? I think GGML is focused on model level re-implementation and improvements. Mojo is a language, super sad. You're more at the compiler level. Do you all work together? Do people choose between them? [00:30:32]Tianqi: So I think in this case, I think it's great to say the ecosystem becomes so rich with so many different ways. So in our case, GGML is more like you're implementing something from scratch in C, right? So that gives you the ability to go and customize each of a particular hardware backend. But then you will need to write from CUDA kernels, and you write optimally from AMD, and so on. So the kind of engineering effort is a bit more broadened in that sense. Mojo, I have not looked at specific details yet. I think it's good to start to say, it's a language, right? I believe there will also be machine learning compilation technologies behind it. So it's good to say, interesting place in there. In the case of MLC, our case is that we do not want to have an opinion on how, where, which language people want to develop, deploy, and so on. And we also realize that actually there are two phases. We want to be able to develop and optimize your model. By optimization, I mean, really bring in the best CUDA kernels and do some of the machine learning engineering in there. And then there's a phase where you want to deploy it as a part of the app. So if you look at the space, you'll find that GGML is more like, I'm going to develop and optimize in the C language, right? And then most of the low-level languages they have. And Mojo is that you want to develop and optimize in Mojo, right? And you deploy in Mojo. In fact, that's the philosophy they want to push for. In the ML case, we find that actually if you want to develop models, the machine learning community likes Python. Python is a language that you should focus on. So in the case of MLC, we really want to be able to enable, not only be able to just define your model in Python, that's very common, right? But also do ML optimization, like engineering optimization, CUDA kernel optimization, memory planning, all those things in Python that makes you customizable and so on. But when you do deployment, we realize that people want a bit of a universal flavor. If you are a web developer, you want JavaScript, right? If you're maybe an embedded system person, maybe you would prefer C++ or C or Rust. And people sometimes do like Python in a lot of cases. So in the case of MLC, we really want to have this vision of, you optimize, build a generic optimization in Python, then you deploy that universally onto the environments that people like. [00:32:54]Swyx: That's a great perspective and comparison, I guess. One thing I wanted to make sure that we cover is that I think you are one of these emerging set of academics that also very much focus on your artifacts of delivery. Of course. Something we talked about for three years, that he was very focused on his GitHub. And obviously you treated XGBoost like a product, you know? And then now you're publishing an iPhone app. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What is his thinking about academics getting involved in shipping products? [00:33:24]Tianqi: I think there are different ways of making impact, right? Definitely, you know, there are academics that are writing papers and building insights for people so that people can build product on top of them. In my case, I think the particular field I'm working on, machine learning systems, I feel like really we need to be able to get it to the hand of people so that really we see the problem, right? And we show that we can solve a problem. And it's a different way of making impact. And there are academics that are doing similar things. Like, you know, if you look at some of the people from Berkeley, right? A few years, they will come up with big open source projects. Certainly, I think it's just a healthy ecosystem to have different ways of making impacts. And I feel like really be able to do open source and work with open source community is really rewarding because we have a real problem to work on when we build our research. Actually, those research bring together and people will be able to make use of them. And we also start to see interesting research challenges that we wouldn't otherwise say, right, if you're just trying to do a prototype and so on. So I feel like it's something that is one interesting way of making impact, making contributions. [00:34:40]Swyx: Yeah, you definitely have a lot of impact there. And having experience publishing Mac stuff before, the Apple App Store is no joke. It is the hardest compilation, human compilation effort. So one thing that we definitely wanted to cover is running in the browser. You have a 70 billion parameter model running in the browser. That's right. Can you just talk about how? Yeah, of course. [00:35:02]Tianqi: So I think that there are a few elements that need to come in, right? First of all, you know, we do need a MacBook, the latest one, like M2 Max, because you need the memory to be big enough to cover that. So for a 70 million model, it takes you about, I think, 50 gigahertz of RAM. So the M2 Max, the upper version, will be able to run it, right? And it also leverages machine learning compilation. Again, what we are doing is the same, whether it's running on iPhone, on server cloud GPUs, on AMDs, or on MacBook, we all go through that same MOC pipeline. Of course, in certain cases, maybe we'll do a bit of customization iteration for either ones. And then it runs on the browser runtime, this package of WebLM. So that will effectively... So what we do is we will take that original model and compile to what we call WebGPU. And then the WebLM will be to pick it up. And the WebGPU is this latest GPU technology that major browsers are shipping right now. So you can get it in Chrome for them already. It allows you to be able to access your native GPUs from a browser. And then effectively, that language model is just invoking the WebGPU kernels through there. So actually, when the LATMAR2 came out, initially, we asked the question about, can you run 17 billion on a MacBook? That was the question we're asking. So first, we actually... Jin Lu, who is the engineer pushing this, he got 17 billion on a MacBook. We had a CLI version. So in MLC, you will be able to... That runs through a metal accelerator. So effectively, you use the metal programming language to get the GPU acceleration. So we find, okay, it works for the MacBook. Then we asked, we had a WebGPU backend. Why not try it there? So we just tried it out. And it's really amazing to see everything up and running. And actually, it runs smoothly in that case. So I do think there are some kind of interesting use cases already in this, because everybody has a browser. You don't need to install anything. I think it doesn't make sense yet to really run a 17 billion model on a browser, because you kind of need to be able to download the weight and so on. But I think we're getting there. Effectively, the most powerful models you will be able to run on a consumer device. It's kind of really amazing. And also, in a lot of cases, there might be use cases. For example, if I'm going to build a chatbot that I talk to it and answer questions, maybe some of the components, like the voice to text, could run on the client side. And so there are a lot of possibilities of being able to have something hybrid that contains the edge component or something that runs on a server. [00:37:47]Alessio: Do these browser models have a way for applications to hook into them? So if I'm using, say, you can use OpenAI or you can use the local model. Of course. [00:37:56]Tianqi: Right now, actually, we are building... So there's an NPM package called WebILM, right? So that you will be able to, if you want to embed it onto your web app, you will be able to directly depend on WebILM and you will be able to use it. We are also having a REST API that's OpenAI compatible. So that REST API, I think, right now, it's actually running on native backend. So that if a CUDA server is faster to run on native backend. But also we have a WebGPU version of it that you can go and run. So yeah, we do want to be able to have easier integrations with existing applications. And OpenAI API is certainly one way to do that. Yeah, this is great. [00:38:37]Swyx: I actually did not know there's an NPM package that makes it very, very easy to try out and use. I want to actually... One thing I'm unclear about is the chronology. Because as far as I know, Chrome shipped WebGPU the same time that you shipped WebILM. Okay, yeah. So did you have some kind of secret chat with Chrome? [00:38:57]Tianqi: The good news is that Chrome is doing a very good job of trying to have early release. So although the official shipment of the Chrome WebGPU is the same time as WebILM, actually, you will be able to try out WebGPU technology in Chrome. There is an unstable version called Canary. I think as early as two years ago, there was a WebGPU version. Of course, it's getting better. So we had a TVM-based WebGPU backhand two years ago. Of course, at that time, there were no language models. It was running on less interesting, well, still quite interesting models. And then this year, we really started to see it getting matured and performance keeping up. So we have a more serious push of bringing the language model compatible runtime onto the WebGPU. [00:39:45]Swyx: I think you agree that the hardest part is the model download. Has there been conversations about a one-time model download and sharing between all the apps that might use this API? That is a great point. [00:39:58]Tianqi: I think it's already supported in some sense. When we download the model, WebILM will cache it onto a special Chrome cache. So if a different web app uses the same WebILM JavaScript package, you don't need to redownload the model again. So there is already something there. But of course, you have to download the model once at least to be able to use it. [00:40:19]Swyx: Okay. One more thing just in general before we're about to zoom out to OctoAI. Just the last question is, you're not the only project working on, I guess, local models. That's right. Alternative models. There's gpt4all, there's olama that just recently came out, and there's a bunch of these. What would be your advice to them on what's a valuable problem to work on? And what is just thin wrappers around ggml? Like, what are the interesting problems in this space, basically? [00:40:45]Tianqi: I think making API better is certainly something useful, right? In general, one thing that we do try to push very hard on is this idea of easier universal deployment. So we are also looking forward to actually have more integration with MOC. That's why we're trying to build API like WebILM and other things. So we're also looking forward to collaborate with all those ecosystems and working support to bring in models more universally and be able to also keep up the best performance when possible in a more push-button way. [00:41:15]Alessio: So as we mentioned in the beginning, you're also the co-founder of Octomel. Recently, Octomel released OctoAI, which is a compute service, basically focuses on optimizing model runtimes and acceleration and compilation. What has been the evolution there? So Octo started as kind of like a traditional MLOps tool, where people were building their own models and you help them on that side. And then it seems like now most of the market is shifting to starting from pre-trained generative models. Yeah, what has been that experience for you and what you've seen the market evolve? And how did you decide to release OctoAI? [00:41:52]Tianqi: One thing that we found out is that on one hand, it's really easy to go and get something up and running, right? So if you start to consider there's so many possible availabilities and scalability issues and even integration issues since becoming kind of interesting and complicated. So we really want to make sure to help people to get that part easy, right? And now a lot of things, if we look at the customers we talk to and the market, certainly generative AI is something that is very interesting. So that is something that we really hope to help elevate. And also building on top of technology we build to enable things like portability across hardwares. And you will be able to not worry about the specific details, right? Just focus on getting the model out. We'll try to work on infrastructure and other things that helps on the other end. [00:42:45]Alessio: And when it comes to getting optimization on the runtime, I see when we run an early adopters community and most enterprises issue is how to actually run these models. Do you see that as one of the big bottlenecks now? I think a few years ago it was like, well, we don't have a lot of machine learning talent. We cannot develop our own models. Versus now it's like, there's these great models you can use, but I don't know how to run them efficiently. [00:43:12]Tianqi: That depends on how you define by running, right? On one hand, it's easy to download your MLC, like you download it, you run on a laptop, but then there's also different decisions, right? What if you are trying to serve a larger user request? What if that request changes? What if the availability of hardware changes? Right now it's really hard to get the latest hardware on media, unfortunately, because everybody's trying to work on the things using the hardware that's out there. So I think when the definition of run changes, there are a lot more questions around things. And also in a lot of cases, it's not only about running models, it's also about being able to solve problems around them. How do you manage your model locations and how do you make sure that you get your model close to your execution environment more efficiently? So definitely a lot of engineering challenges out there. That we hope to elevate, yeah. And also, if you think about our future, definitely I feel like right now the technology, given the technology and the kind of hardware availability we have today, we will need to make use of all the possible hardware available out there. That will include a mechanism for cutting down costs, bringing something to the edge and cloud in a more natural way. So I feel like still this is a very early stage of where we are, but it's already good to see a lot of interesting progress. [00:44:35]Alessio: Yeah, that's awesome. I would love, I don't know how much we're going to go in depth into it, but what does it take to actually abstract all of this from the end user? You know, like they don't need to know what GPUs you run, what cloud you're running them on. You take all of that away. What was that like as an engineering challenge? [00:44:51]Tianqi: So I think that there are engineering challenges on. In fact, first of all, you will need to be able to support all the kind of hardware backhand you have, right? On one hand, if you look at the media library, you'll find very surprisingly, not too surprisingly, most of the latest libraries works well on the latest GPU. But there are other GPUs out there in the cloud as well. So certainly being able to have know-hows and being able to do model optimization is one thing, right? Also infrastructures on being able to scale things up, locate models. And in a lot of cases, we do find that on typical models, it also requires kind of vertical iterations. So it's not about, you know, build a silver bullet and that silver bullet is going to solve all the problems. It's more about, you know, we're building a product, we'll work with the users and we find out there are interesting opportunities in a certain point. And when our engineer will go and solve that, and it will automatically reflect it in a service. [00:45:45]Swyx: Awesome. [00:45:46]Alessio: We can jump into the lightning round until, I don't know, Sean, if you have more questions or TQ, if you have more stuff you wanted to talk about that we didn't get a chance to [00:45:54]Swyx: touch on. [00:45:54]Alessio: Yeah, we have talked a lot. [00:45:55]Swyx: So, yeah. We always would like to ask, you know, do you have a commentary on other parts of AI and ML that is interesting to you? [00:46:03]Tianqi: So right now, I think one thing that we are really pushing hard for is this question about how far can we bring open source, right? I'm kind of like a hacker and I really like to put things together. So I think it's unclear in the future of what the future of AI looks like. On one hand, it could be possible that, you know, you just have a few big players, you just try to talk to those bigger language models and that can do everything, right? On the other hand, one of the things that Wailing Academic is really excited and pushing for, that's one reason why I'm pushing for MLC, is that can we build something where you have different models? You have personal models that know the best movie you like, but you also have bigger models that maybe know more, and you get those models to interact with each other, right? And be able to have a wide ecosystem of AI agents that helps each person while still being able to do things like personalization. Some of them can run locally, some of them, of course, running on a cloud, and how do they interact with each other? So I think that is a very exciting time where the future is yet undecided, but I feel like there is something we can do to shape that future as well. [00:47:18]Swyx: One more thing, which is something I'm also pursuing, which is, and this kind of goes back into predictions, but also back in your history, do you have any idea, or are you looking out for anything post-transformers as far as architecture is concerned? [00:47:32]Tianqi: I think, you know, in a lot of these cases, you can find there are already promising models for long contexts, right? There are space-based models, where like, you know, a lot of some of our colleagues from Albert, who he worked on this HIPPO models, right? And then there is an open source version called RWKV. It's like a recurrent models that allows you to summarize things. Actually, we are bringing RWKV to MOC as well, so maybe you will be able to see one of the models. [00:48:00]Swyx: We actually recorded an episode with one of the RWKV core members. It's unclear because there's no academic backing. It's just open source people. Oh, I see. So you like the merging of recurrent networks and transformers? [00:48:13]Tianqi: I do love to see this model space continue growing, right? And I feel like in a lot of cases, it's just that attention mechanism is getting changed in some sense. So I feel like definitely there are still a lot of things to be explored here. And that is also one reason why we want to keep pushing machine learning compilation, because one of the things we are trying to push in was productivity. So that for machine learning engineering, so that as soon as some of the models came out, we will be able to, you know, empower them onto those environments that's out there. [00:48:43]Swyx: Yeah, it's a really good mission. Okay. Very excited to see that RWKV and state space model stuff. I'm hearing increasing chatter about that stuff. Okay. Lightning round, as always fun. I'll take the first one. Acceleration. What has already happened in AI that you thought would take much longer? [00:48:59]Tianqi: Emergence of more like a conversation chatbot ability is something that kind of surprised me before it came out. This is like one piece that I feel originally I thought would take much longer, but yeah, [00:49:11]Swyx: it happens. And it's funny because like the original, like Eliza chatbot was something that goes all the way back in time. Right. And then we just suddenly came back again. Yeah. [00:49:21]Tianqi: It's always too interesting to think about, but with a kind of a different technology [00:49:25]Swyx: in some sense. [00:49:25]Alessio: What about the most interesting unsolved question in AI? [00:49:31]Swyx: That's a hard one, right? [00:49:32]Tianqi: So I can tell you like what kind of I'm excited about. So, so I think that I have always been excited about this idea of continuous learning and lifelong learning in some sense. So how AI continues to evolve with the knowledges that have been there. It seems that we're getting much closer with all those recent technologies. So being able to develop systems, support, and be able to think about how AI continues to evolve is something that I'm really excited about. [00:50:01]Swyx: So specifically, just to double click on this, are you talking about continuous training? That's like a training. [00:50:06]Tianqi: I feel like, you know, training adaptation and it's all similar things, right? You want to think about entire life cycle, right? The life cycle of collecting data, training, fine tuning, and maybe have your local context that getting continuously curated and feed onto models. So I think all these things are interesting and relevant in here. [00:50:29]Swyx: Yeah. I think this is something that people are really asking, you know, right now we have moved a lot into the sort of pre-training phase and off the shelf, you know, the model downloads and stuff like that, which seems very counterintuitive compared to the continuous training paradigm that people want. So I guess the last question would be for takeaways. What's basically one message that you want every listener, every person to remember today? [00:50:54]Tianqi: I think it's getting more obvious now, but I think one of the things that I always want to mention in my talks is that, you know, when you're thinking about AI applications, originally people think about algorithms a lot more, right? Our algorithm models, they are still very important. But usually when you build AI applications, it takes, you know, both algorithm side, the system optimizations, and the data curations, right? So it takes a connection of so many facades to be able to bring together an AI system and be able to look at it from that holistic perspective is really useful when we start to build modern applications. I think it's going to continue going to be more important in the future. [00:51:35]Swyx: Yeah. Thank you for showing the way on this. And honestly, just making things possible that I thought would take a lot longer. So thanks for everything you've done. [00:51:46]Tianqi: Thank you for having me. [00:51:47]Swyx: Yeah. [00:51:47]Alessio: Thanks for coming on TQ. [00:51:49]Swyx: Have a good one. [00:51:49] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Today we're joined by Bayan Bruss, Vice President of Applied ML Research at Capital One. In our conversation with Bayan, we covered a pair of papers his team presented at this year's ICML conference. We begin with the paper Interpretable Subspaces in Image Representations, where Bayan gives us a dive deep into the interpretability framework, embedding dimensions, contrastive approaches, and how their model can accelerate image representation in deep learning. We also explore GOAT: A Global Transformer on Large-scale Graphs, a scalable global graph transformer. We talk through the computation challenges, homophilic and heterophilic principles, model sparsity, and how their research proposes methodologies to get around the computational barrier when scaling to large-scale graph models. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/641.

OnBoard! 一大波更新要来啦！Monica 最近一个月都在硅谷，之前怠慢了一段时间，很快就会补上啦。 这次的节目非常特别，是在ICML 2023 (International Conference on Machine Learning, 国际机器学习大会）的现场录制的。这次的嘉宾，爱丁堡大学博士生符尧，更是众望所归，相信最近关注大语言模型的朋友都不陌生。他的好几篇关于大语言模型能力研究的文章，几乎都是业内必读。 Hello World, who is OnBoard!? 正如符尧在一篇总结文章中所说：“ICML 2023，OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta，各大名校的 rising star PhD，顶级 hedge fund 与 VC ，most popular startups 悉数到场，这里是诸神之战的最前线。” 我们就在诸神之战的现场，回顾了ICML与各位大神现场交流的见闻，fuyao对于数据、RLHF等大模型核心研究领域的思考，还有对震动行业的、刚刚发布的LlaMA-2的看法。 这次在室外录制，嘉宾还在生病，不免有些杂音。但是我想这对于关注干货的听众来说，都不是问题。相信你也会受益匪浅。Enjoy! *本期涉及比较多的术语，需要你对大模型（LLM）有基础的技术了解。 嘉宾介绍 符尧，爱丁堡大学的博士生，研究大语言模型的推理能力。符尧在北京大学完成了本科学位，在哥伦比亚大学完成了硕士学位，曾在MIT-IBM AI 实验室，Allen Institute for AI (AI2) 等担任实习研究员。他的工作主题包括了大语言模型演化，复杂推理，涌现能力，以及如何从第一性原理构造模型。他以《拆解追溯 GPT-3.5 各项能力的起源》为代表的文章系列详细阐述了语言模型的能力机制，在中文和全球互联网上都产生了重大的影响力。 我们都聊了什么 02:05 凡尔赛开场 & 嘉宾符尧的介绍 04:33 认识ICML，参加诸神之战的盛会是什么体验；付尧入选的论文如何探讨模型能力的遗忘 08:09 过去半年，对模型能力有什么新的理解 09:36 解决模型能力遗忘为什么重要，有什么挑战 13:49 模型能力遗忘对于垂直领域模型有什么影响 17:39 蒸馏 (Distillation) 技术为什么重要，现在研究和落地处在什么阶段 24:00 算力紧张，以后更多的创新研究都会发生在业界而不是学术界吗 26:39 ICML上看到了哪些有意思的研究 - paper 推荐！ 30:41 最火的话题1：基于LLM的agents 构建有什么挑战和解法 37:36 现在的大语言模型能力可以支持怎样的Agent? 48:51 最火的话题2：解读 Llama 2，最让人印象深刻的变化是什么？ 56:25 基于Llama 2,学术界可以有什么研究方向？ 59:06 ICML 上亲历的大神交流 61:57 符尧还在关注哪些新的研究方向 & 我们对 Agent 集群的畅想 我们提到的内容 符尧的ICML论文：Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning T5: Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models Chatbot Arena: Benchmarking LLMs in the Wild with Elo Ratings The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU FLOWGEN: Fast and slow graph generation by Aman Madaan 符尧的Llama 2 讨论会 memo (7/18/2023) RL: Reinforcement learning, 强化学习 SFT: Supervised Fine Tuning, 监督微调 RLHF: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, 人类反馈强化学习 Distillation: 蒸馏，基于大语言模型训练小模型的方法 Scaling law: A mathematical relationship where performance improves with increasing size, 规模定律 Alignment tax: Additional effort to align a model's behavior with human values, 对齐税 参考文章 符尧的个人主页 ICML 2023 手记 - 诸神之战的最前线 符尧的博客 A Closer Look at Large Language Models Emergent Abilities, by Yao Fu How does GPT Obtain its Ability? Tracing Emergent Abilities of Language Models to their Sources, by Yao Fu Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback, by John Schulman Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models, by Jason Wei Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models, by Jason Wei 别忘了，关注M小姐的微信公众号，了解更多中美软件、AI与创业投资的干货内容！ M小姐研习录 (ID: MissMStudy) 大家的点赞、评论、转发是对我们最好的鼓励！如果你能在小宇宙上点个赞，Apple Podcasts 上给个五星好评，就能让更多的朋友看到我们努力制作的内容，打赏请我们喝杯咖啡，就给你比心！ 有任何心得和建议，也欢迎在评论区跟我们互动~

Go online to PeerView.com/YEK860 to view the activity, download slides and practice aids, and complete the post-test to earn credit. BTK inhibitors (BTKi) have transformed the management of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and supplanted the serial use of chemoimmunotherapy (CIT) following progression on standard upfront regimens. Ongoing investigations have recently suggested that BTKi-based regimens, including in combination with CIT or CD20 antibodies, may be effective treatment options in the first-line setting. What does this mean in light of new science that has confirmed a role of non-covalent BTKi and immunotherapy as active sequential options in MCL? In this MasterClass & Case Forum activity, based on a symposium recorded during the 2023 ICML conference in Lugano, a panel of experts uses a blended lecture and case-based approach to provide learners with guidance on the differences between covalent BTKi options that can inform treatment selection and how the migration of BTKi to frontline care may impact subsequent treatment decisions with other BTKi strategies, CAR-T, and bispecific antibodies. View this activity now and adapt your practice to reflect the changing times in MCL! Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to: Cite the mechanistic, selectivity, and relevant safety profiles of first- and second-generation BTKi options with applications in the MCL setting; Summarize the efficacy evidence supporting the use of BTKi and other innovative strategies across the spectrum of MCL, including newly diagnosed and R/R disease; Select optimal upfront and sequential treatment with novel agent classes, including BTKi, for the management of treatment-naïve and R/R MCL; and Develop protocols to address practical aspects of MCL care when using novel therapeutic strategies, including monitoring, patient/caregiver education, adherence, and AE management

Go online to PeerView.com/YEK860 to view the activity, download slides and practice aids, and complete the post-test to earn credit. BTK inhibitors (BTKi) have transformed the management of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and supplanted the serial use of chemoimmunotherapy (CIT) following progression on standard upfront regimens. Ongoing investigations have recently suggested that BTKi-based regimens, including in combination with CIT or CD20 antibodies, may be effective treatment options in the first-line setting. What does this mean in light of new science that has confirmed a role of non-covalent BTKi and immunotherapy as active sequential options in MCL? In this MasterClass & Case Forum activity, based on a symposium recorded during the 2023 ICML conference in Lugano, a panel of experts uses a blended lecture and case-based approach to provide learners with guidance on the differences between covalent BTKi options that can inform treatment selection and how the migration of BTKi to frontline care may impact subsequent treatment decisions with other BTKi strategies, CAR-T, and bispecific antibodies. View this activity now and adapt your practice to reflect the changing times in MCL! Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to: Cite the mechanistic, selectivity, and relevant safety profiles of first- and second-generation BTKi options with applications in the MCL setting; Summarize the efficacy evidence supporting the use of BTKi and other innovative strategies across the spectrum of MCL, including newly diagnosed and R/R disease; Select optimal upfront and sequential treatment with novel agent classes, including BTKi, for the management of treatment-naïve and R/R MCL; and Develop protocols to address practical aspects of MCL care when using novel therapeutic strategies, including monitoring, patient/caregiver education, adherence, and AE management

Go online to PeerView.com/YEK860 to view the activity, download slides and practice aids, and complete the post-test to earn credit. BTK inhibitors (BTKi) have transformed the management of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and supplanted the serial use of chemoimmunotherapy (CIT) following progression on standard upfront regimens. Ongoing investigations have recently suggested that BTKi-based regimens, including in combination with CIT or CD20 antibodies, may be effective treatment options in the first-line setting. What does this mean in light of new science that has confirmed a role of non-covalent BTKi and immunotherapy as active sequential options in MCL? In this MasterClass & Case Forum activity, based on a symposium recorded during the 2023 ICML conference in Lugano, a panel of experts uses a blended lecture and case-based approach to provide learners with guidance on the differences between covalent BTKi options that can inform treatment selection and how the migration of BTKi to frontline care may impact subsequent treatment decisions with other BTKi strategies, CAR-T, and bispecific antibodies. View this activity now and adapt your practice to reflect the changing times in MCL! Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to: Cite the mechanistic, selectivity, and relevant safety profiles of first- and second-generation BTKi options with applications in the MCL setting; Summarize the efficacy evidence supporting the use of BTKi and other innovative strategies across the spectrum of MCL, including newly diagnosed and R/R disease; Select optimal upfront and sequential treatment with novel agent classes, including BTKi, for the management of treatment-naïve and R/R MCL; and Develop protocols to address practical aspects of MCL care when using novel therapeutic strategies, including monitoring, patient/caregiver education, adherence, and AE management

Go online to PeerView.com/YEK860 to view the activity, download slides and practice aids, and complete the post-test to earn credit. BTK inhibitors (BTKi) have transformed the management of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and supplanted the serial use of chemoimmunotherapy (CIT) following progression on standard upfront regimens. Ongoing investigations have recently suggested that BTKi-based regimens, including in combination with CIT or CD20 antibodies, may be effective treatment options in the first-line setting. What does this mean in light of new science that has confirmed a role of non-covalent BTKi and immunotherapy as active sequential options in MCL? In this MasterClass & Case Forum activity, based on a symposium recorded during the 2023 ICML conference in Lugano, a panel of experts uses a blended lecture and case-based approach to provide learners with guidance on the differences between covalent BTKi options that can inform treatment selection and how the migration of BTKi to frontline care may impact subsequent treatment decisions with other BTKi strategies, CAR-T, and bispecific antibodies. View this activity now and adapt your practice to reflect the changing times in MCL! Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to: Cite the mechanistic, selectivity, and relevant safety profiles of first- and second-generation BTKi options with applications in the MCL setting; Summarize the efficacy evidence supporting the use of BTKi and other innovative strategies across the spectrum of MCL, including newly diagnosed and R/R disease; Select optimal upfront and sequential treatment with novel agent classes, including BTKi, for the management of treatment-naïve and R/R MCL; and Develop protocols to address practical aspects of MCL care when using novel therapeutic strategies, including monitoring, patient/caregiver education, adherence, and AE management

Go online to PeerView.com/YEK860 to view the activity, download slides and practice aids, and complete the post-test to earn credit. BTK inhibitors (BTKi) have transformed the management of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) and supplanted the serial use of chemoimmunotherapy (CIT) following progression on standard upfront regimens. Ongoing investigations have recently suggested that BTKi-based regimens, including in combination with CIT or CD20 antibodies, may be effective treatment options in the first-line setting. What does this mean in light of new science that has confirmed a role of non-covalent BTKi and immunotherapy as active sequential options in MCL? In this MasterClass & Case Forum activity, based on a symposium recorded during the 2023 ICML conference in Lugano, a panel of experts uses a blended lecture and case-based approach to provide learners with guidance on the differences between covalent BTKi options that can inform treatment selection and how the migration of BTKi to frontline care may impact subsequent treatment decisions with other BTKi strategies, CAR-T, and bispecific antibodies. View this activity now and adapt your practice to reflect the changing times in MCL! Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to: Cite the mechanistic, selectivity, and relevant safety profiles of first- and second-generation BTKi options with applications in the MCL setting; Summarize the efficacy evidence supporting the use of BTKi and other innovative strategies across the spectrum of MCL, including newly diagnosed and R/R disease; Select optimal upfront and sequential treatment with novel agent classes, including BTKi, for the management of treatment-naïve and R/R MCL; and Develop protocols to address practical aspects of MCL care when using novel therapeutic strategies, including monitoring, patient/caregiver education, adherence, and AE management

In the news:  CreativePro rebrand!!  Design & Marketing Summit, July 27–28, online only Adobe MAX 2023, David and Anne-Marie are doing live sessions InDesign 18.4 is slowly being rolled out CreativePro Week was phenomenal! Grab an On Demand Pass to watch all the sessions, including IGNITE! and download the handouts  Next year in Washington DC! More info to come. CreativePro Magazine June 2023, issue 20: Email templates, cover story by our designer Pam Sparks! Also great InDesign tips and tricks Getting geeky with IDML, Tagged Text, ICML, and Snippet files Obscure Feature of the Week: Remove Forced Line Break Sponsor for this episode >> Noble Desktop: For over 30 years, Noble Desktop's project-based classes and certificate programs have given professionals the tools to pursue creative careers in design, coding, and beyond. Learn more about them on our Training Provider page or at NobleDesktop.com. Links mentioned in this podcast YES our original InDesign Secrets mug IS still available! https://www.cafepress.com/mf/14282011/large-indesignsecrets-_mugs?productId=60507004 Watch our free webinar: Creating Social Media Assets with InDesign https://creativepro.com/watch-on-demand-indesign-social-assets/ We're speaking at MAX 2023 David Blatner Anne-Marie Concepcion Pam's article on Building Email Templates: https://creativepro.com/building-email-templates/ Getting Geeky: Snippets: https://creativepro.com/the-joy-of-snippets/ https://creativepro.com/place-snippets-at-the-same-location-or-not/ https://creativepro.com/locking-snippets/ https://creativepro.com/using-indesign-snippets-in-a-printing-workflow/ Tagged Text: Database or spreadsheet to tagged text: https://creativepro.com/automate-text-formatting-with-tagged-text/ IDML: Jeff Potter's amazing web app to IDML trick: https://creativepro.com/harnessing-the-power-of-text-variables-and-idml/ Hard-core editing to fix RGB Black: https://creativepro.com/turning-rgb-black-to-cmyk-black/ Download this great illustrated guide to IDML by Mike Rankin: https://creativepro.com/downloads/Anatomy_of_IDML.pdf Color swatches that won't delete: https://creativepro.com/color-swatches-that-wont-delete/

Get ready for an informative and exciting episode of Product by Design, as host Kyle introduces his guest, Gopal, the CTO and head of Sust Global, a climate and data startup. In this episode, Kyle and Gopal discuss the increasing use of climate-related data and analytics in corporate reporting and risk management. They also dive into how Sust Global has developed an API and dashboarding products to help companies understand and prepare for climate risk. You'll learn about the importance of driving a shared understanding through data and how machine learning and AI can help with climate analytics. Gopal also shares valuable advice for those starting out or looking to level up in data analytics. Don't miss this insightful episode filled with expert tips on how to effectively address the challenges posed by climate change. Gopal Erinjippurath:Gopal serves as CTO and Head of Product at Sust Global, a venture focused on geospatial analytics for climate adaptation.Most recently, he led the Analytics Engineering team at Planet Labs (NYSE:PL), an integrated aerospace and data analytics company that operates history's largest commercial fleet of earth observation satellites. Planet Analytics serves a range of customers from city planning teams in governments and the World Bank to defense and intelligence functions across the world. He is known for agile engineering execution from concept to scalable high quality products. He has been an invited speaker at global industry conferences like Google Cloud Next and leading technical conferences in the machine learning space such as ICML, CVPR and NeurIPS.Links from the Show:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopalerinjippurath/ Sust Global: https://www.sustglobal.com/ From Our Partners:Future London Academy's MBA for Design Leaders: bit.ly/chiefdesignerMore by Kyle:Follow Product by Design and Kyle on TwitterFollow Product by Design and Kyle on TikTokSign up for Kyle's Product Thinking Newsletter for more updates.Kyle's writing on MediumProduct by Design on MediumLike our podcast, consider Buying Us a Coffee or supporting us on Patreon[00:00:12] Remote sensing and climate modeling for predictive analytics[00:04:42] Sports and Climate Risk for Businesses[00:09:05] Creating API and Dashboard for Specific Market Use Cases[00:13:40] Sustainability and Climate Change Risks[00:18:08] Machine learning & AI for climate change adaptation[00:22:31] Driving Shared Understanding through Data[00:26:51] The Three Dimensions of Successful Businesses[00:31:21] Challenges of Working with Earth Observation Satellites[00:35:33] Bridging gap between early adopters and mainstream users[00:40:03] Tips for Advancing in Data Analytics

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Four mindset disagreements behind existential risk disagreements in ML, published by RobBensinger on April 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I've previously written that good ideas and conversations about AGI seem to have propagated through ML weirdly slowly. A different weird phenomenon I observe is that the field's relative inaction about AGI seems less based on a confident set of beliefs about AGI definitely going well (or definitely being far off), and more based on an implicit sense like "the default is everything going well, and we don't need to change anything until there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary". Some people do have confident beliefs that imply "things will go well"; I disagree there, but I expect some amount of disagreement like that. But that doesn't seem to be the crux for most people in ML. In a sane world, it doesn't seem like "well, maybe AI will get stuck at human-ish levels for decades" or "well, maybe superintelligence couldn't invent any wild new tech" ought to be cruxes for "Should we pause AI development?" or "Is alignment research the world's top priority?" Note that I'm not arguing "an AGI-mediated extinction event is such a big deal that we should make it a top priority even if it's very unlikely". There are enough other powerful technologies on the horizon, and enough other risks for civilizational collapse or value lock-in, that I don't in fact think AGI x-risk should get major attention if it's very unlikely. But the most common view within ML seems to be less "it's super unlikely for reasons X Y Z", and more of an "I haven't thought about it much" and/or "I see some reasons to be very worried, but also some reasons things might be fine, so I end up with medium-ish levels of worry". 48% of researchers who had recently published in NeurIPS or ICML gave double-digit probabilities in mid-2022 to advanced AI's long-term effect being “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)”. A similar number gave double-digit probabilities to "human inability to control future advanced AI systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species". 91% of researchers working on "long-term AI topics" at CHAI, DeepMind, MIRI, OpenAI, Open Philanthropy, and what would become Anthropic gave double-digit probabilities in early 2021 to "the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, as a result of AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended". The level of concern and seriousness I see from ML researchers discussing AGI on any social media platform or in any mainstream venue seems wildly out of step with "half of us think there's a 10+% chance of our work resulting in an existential catastrophe". I think the following four factors help partly (though not completely) explain what's going on. If I'm right, then I think there's some hope that the field can explicitly talk about these things and consciously course-correct. "Conservative" predictions, versus conservative decision-making. Waiting for a fire alarm, versus intervening proactively. Anchoring to what's familiar, versus trying to account for potential novelties in AGI. Modeling existential risks in far mode, versus near mode. 1. "Conservative" predictions, versus conservative decision-making If you're building toward a technology as novel and powerful as "automating every cognitive ability a human can do", then it may sound "conservative" to predict modest impacts. But at the decision-making level, you should be "conservative" in a very different sense, by not gambling the future on your technology being low-impact. The first long-form discussion of AI alignment, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Creating Friendly AI 1.0, made this point in 2001: The conservative assumption according to futur...

Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina holds an MSc and PhD in AI from the University of California, Irvine as well as an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Gubkin Institute. Her research focuses on machine learning, neural data analysis, and neuroscience-inspired AI. In particular, she is exploring continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modelling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis. Prof. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modelling. She has served as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML. Irina's research is focussed on taking us closer to the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. She continues to push the boundaries of machine learning, continually striving to make advancements in neuroscience-inspired AI. In a conversation about artificial intelligence (AI), Irina and Tim discussed the idea of transhumanism and the potential for AI to improve human flourishing. Irina suggested that instead of looking at AI as something to be controlled and regulated, people should view it as a tool to augment human capabilities. She argued that attempting to create an AI that is smarter than humans is not the best approach, and that a hybrid of human and AI intelligence is much more beneficial. As an example, she mentioned how technology can be used as an extension of the human mind, to track mental states and improve self-understanding. Ultimately, Irina concluded that transhumanism is about having a symbiotic relationship with technology, which can have a positive effect on both parties. Tim then discussed the contrasting types of intelligence and how this could lead to something interesting emerging from the combination. He brought up the Trolley Problem and how difficult moral quandaries could be programmed into an AI. Irina then referenced The Garden of Forking Paths, a story which explores the idea of how different paths in life can be taken and how decisions from the past can have an effect on the present. To better understand AI and intelligence, Irina suggested looking at it from multiple perspectives and understanding the importance of complex systems science in programming and understanding dynamical systems. She discussed the work of Michael Levin, who is looking into reprogramming biological computers with chemical interventions, and Tim mentioned Alex Mordvinsev, who is looking into the self-healing and repair of these systems. Ultimately, Irina argued that the key to understanding AI and intelligence is to recognize the complexity of the systems and to create hybrid models of human and AI intelligence. Find Irina; https://mila.quebec/en/person/irina-rish/ https://twitter.com/irinarish YT version: https://youtu.be/8-ilcF0R7mI MLST Discord: https://discord.gg/aNPkGUQtc5 References; The Garden of Forking Paths: Jorge Luis Borges [Jorge Luis Borges] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Garden-Forking-Paths-Penguin-Modern/dp/0241339057 The Brain from Inside Out [György Buzsáki] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-Inside-Out-Gy%C3%B6rgy-Buzs%C3%A1ki/dp/0190905387 Growing Isotropic Neural Cellular Automata [Alexander Mordvintsev] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01681 The Extended Mind [Andy Clark and David Chalmers] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328150 The Gentle Seduction [Marc Stiegler] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentle-Seduction-Marc-Stiegler/dp/0671698877

Today we close out our ICML 2022 coverage joined by Sharad Goel, a professor of public policy at Harvard University. In our conversation with Sharad, we discuss his Outstanding Paper award winner Causal Conceptions of Fairness and their Consequences, which seeks to understand what it means to apply causality to the idea of fairness in ML. We explore the two broad classes of intent that have been conceptualized under the subfield of causal fairness and how they differ, the distinct ways causality is treated in economic and statistical contexts vs a computer science and algorithmic context, and why policies are created in the context of causal definitions are suboptimal broadly. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/586

Today we continue our ICML coverage joined by Melika Payvand, a research scientist at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. Melika spoke at the Hardware Aware Efficient Training (HAET) Workshop, delivering a keynote on Brain-inspired hardware and algorithm co-design for low power online training on the edge. In our conversation with Melika, we explore her work at the intersection of ML and neuroinformatics, what makes the proposed architecture “brain-inspired”, and how techniques like online learning fit into the picture. We also discuss the characteristics of the devices that are running the algorithms she's creating, and the challenges of adapting online learning-style algorithms to this hardware. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/585