Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models

DSA ADS Course - 2022

Discuss training large language models and AI foundation models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. Review risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles (e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). 

Understand complexity of foundation model applications and law of unintended consequences. Subject matter context and process experience critical.

Methods to mitigate risks including small scale experiments and trial and error to improve and modify applications.

Importance of consistent and ongoing improvement/modification of applications using data science team. How to form a diverse date science team with appropriate talent to create and maintain high performance team. Importance of integrating business and knowledge process skills. Cross-polination of business skills with team. Machine learning talent within the data science team.

March, 2022

Abstract

We investigate the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model under a given compute budget. We find that current large language models are significantly undertrained, a consequence of the recent focus on scaling language models whilst keeping the amount of training data constant. By training over \nummodels language models ranging from 70 million to over 16 billion parameters on 5 to 500 billion tokens, we find that for compute-optimal training, the model size and the number of training tokens should be scaled equally: for every doubling of model size the number of training tokens should also be doubled. We test this hypothesis by training a predicted compute-optimal model, \chinchilla, that uses the same compute budget as \gopher but with 70B parameters and 4× more more data. \chinchilla uniformly and significantly outperforms \Gopher (280B), GPT-3 (175B), Jurassic-1 (178B), and Megatron-Turing NLG (530B) on a large range of downstream evaluation tasks. This also means that \chinchilla uses substantially less compute for fine-tuning and inference, greatly facilitating downstream usage. As a highlight, \chinchilla reaches a state-of-the-art average accuracy of 67.5\% on the MMLU benchmark, greater than a 7\% improvement over \gopher.

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