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There is going to be a huge shift in scientific practice as a result of the success of GPT-3 and other similar breakthroughs in NLP. The methodology that produc
by d_burfoot 6y ago
There is going to be a huge shift in scientific practice as a result of the success of GPT-3 and other similar breakthroughs in NLP. The methodology that produced GPT-3 is going to work for many other domains, not just text. The process is basically this:
1. Compile a huge dataset of observations relevant to your domain
2. Using the cross-entropy loss or some close variant, train a raw data statistical model of the observations
3. Make the model immensely complex (GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters); this can be done without overfitting because of the huge size of the dataset.
4. Once the raw data model is available, reuse it for various related tasks of practical interest. The immense sophistication of the raw data model will make the practical task much easier.
GPT-3 demonstrates clearly that this methodology works, and produces far more powerful results than other more mainstream approaches in NLP that depend on laborious human annotation. In my view it is nearly certain to produce comparably dramatic results in other domains (I'd be happy to bet on this if anyone is interested).
Here's a longer essay on this topic:
http://danburfoot.net/research/RediscoveryInteriority.html http://danburfoot.net/research/RediscoveryInteriority.html
- yters 6y agowhat practical task in science will gpt-3 like systems improve?
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoApplied genetics. The mapping from gene to phenotype is not, shall we say, injective. Bring in the complexity of epigenetics, biochemistry and you have a complex mess. Biological systems are tremendous black boxes with many second and third order effects that cannot be efficiently simulated and modelled (you can get pretty good approximations within a very narrow scope with supercomputers but those tend to have little practical use outside of basic scientific research). Another use case would be for pharmaceutical research, there are a number of companies already in the ML -> drug pipeline space but GPT has brought new insight to the table.