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You might have some probability distribution in your head for what will come out of GPT-2 on your machine at a certain time, based on your knowledge of the rand
by canjobear 2y ago
You might have some probability distribution in your head for what will come out of GPT-2 on your machine at a certain time, based on your knowledge of the random seed. But that is not the GPT-2 probability distribution, which is objectively defined by model weights that you can download, and which does not correspond to anyone’s beliefs.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoI'm of the view that strictly speaking, even a fair die doesn't have a probability distribution until you throw it. It just so happens that, unless you know almost every detail about the throw, the best you can usually do is uniform. So I would say the same of GPT-2. It's not a random variable unless you query it. But unless you know unreasonably many details, the best you can do to predict the query is the distribution that you would call "objective."
- canjobear 2y agoI think this gets into unanswerable metaphysical questions about when we can say mathematical objects, propositions, etc. really exist. But I think if we take the view that it's not a random variable until we query it, that makes it awkward to talk about how GPT-2 (and similar models) is trained. No one ever draws samples from the model during training, but the whole justification for the cross-entropy-minimizing training procedure is based on thinking about the model as a random variable.