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This is a great reminder, thank you. As someone not skilled in this art, is there anything preventing us from opening that context window many orders of magnit
by nicpottier 4y ago
This is a great reminder, thank you.
As someone not skilled in this art, is there anything preventing us from opening that context window many orders of magnitude? What happens then? And what happens if it is then "thinking in text" faster than we can read them? (with an intent towards paper clips)
This is a genuine question, I'm not trolling.
- lukev 4y agoYou could do those things in theory. I'm not saying that you could never build AGI on top of a LLM, or that such a AGI could not become "misaligned." I'm just saying that having a mental state that's natively in English is a nice property if one is worried about what they are "thinking."
- ldhough 4y agoI'm very much not an expert either but apparently for the regular "attention" mechanism memory and compute requirements scale quadratically with respect to input sequence length. So increasing it by just two orders of magnitude would mean (I think) a full context window needs 10000x more memory and compute time and presumably costs would go up by at least as much. GPT3 (I think) uses the regular attention mechanism while 4 is unknown. However, GPT4 claims there are techniques to improve scaling (complexity down to sub-quadratic or linear) without affecting accuracy too much (I have no clue if true): sparse attention, long-range arena, reformer, and performer. I'm also pretty sure I've read (and anecdotally it seems true) that accuracy decreases with longer input/output sequences regardless. How much I also don't know.