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> The paper opens by saying "Large language models (with more than 1 billion parameters) perform well on a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in z
by holonomically 5y ago
> The paper opens by saying "Large language models (with more than 1 billion parameters) perform well on a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in zero- and few-shot settings, without requiring task-specific supervision," and cite Radford et al. (2019), Brown et al. (2020), and Patwary et al., (2021) for this sentence. But the first paper doesn't claim zero-shot performance and the other two sources are about models orders of magnitude larger! I don't see any evidence in this paper to support the idea that there are people going around claiming that 1B+ parameter models have impressive zero-shot performance.
Maybe not zero-shot performance but they definitely claim few-shot performance which is what your quoted sentence is saying:
> Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. [1]
1: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners - https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- stellaathena 5y agoThat paper also claims zero-shot performance. However, the models that the bulk of the claims are made about are 20x the size of the ones considered in this paper. That's completely consistent with what I said.
- holonomically 5y agoI don't see how that makes a difference. Even if the models were 100x the size it's not like the same argument couldn't be carried through. There is no theoretical reason to believe increasing the number of parameters does anything more than simply allow encoding more of the training set into the parameters. There seems to be a fundamental confusion about what these language models are actually doing, they're glorified compression algorithms. [1] There is no reason to expect any kind of generalization performance from them on common sense tasks. 1: https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/nncp/